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Selling a Wedding Ring
Wedding Rings are a Symbol. What Did This One Mean?
Somehow, I ended up with the wedding ring of my father’s second wife. Although it could actually be his third wife’s wedding ring. All I know for sure is that the delicate, hand-crafted gold ring was among Dad’s possessions when he died. Sorting through his things, I recognized it. Kind of.
I knew it was a wedding ring. I just didn’t know whose.
“Is this Enid’s ring?” I asked my sister, once we’d returned to Philadelphia after Dad’s funeral. “Or is it Madalyn’s?”
Dad’s marital saga, through no fault of his own, was quite an odyssey. After our mother, his first wife, died of cancer, he married Enid, who also, eventually, died of cancer. Then he went steady with Evelyn, but ended up marrying Madalyn, who left him after he had a seizure (So much for “in sickness or in health…”) After another interlude with Evelyn, Dad ended up spending the last 14 years of his life, happily unmarried, with Anita.
My sister and I decided that, even though she’d left Dad, Madalyn would probably have kept her wedding ring. If she’d returned it, it was unlikely that our father would have hung onto this reminder of a failed marriage.
So we were pretty sure this was Enid’s ring.
