It had belonged to my grandmother before it belonged to her.
My mother told me that story countless times.
The ring had been given to my grandmother by my grandfather many decades ago. According to my mother, my grandfather had saved for months to afford it.
The ring wasn't enormous.
It wasn't the kind of piece that would look like something from a celebrity jewelry collection.
But the diamond was old, and the setting was distinctive.
An expert had once estimated its value at around $50,000.
My mother never liked discussing that number.
Whenever someone asked how much it was worth, she would shrug.
“I have no idea,” she'd say.
But I knew.
I had learned its approximate value years earlier, during an insurance appraisal.
I was there when the jeweler examined it.
He had looked at the ring carefully, checked the stone, examined the setting, and finally told my mother the estimated replacement value.
My mother had stared at him.
“Fifty thousand dollars?”
The jeweler nodded.
She laughed.
“That's ridiculous.”
He smiled.
“It's valuable.”
She slipped the ring back onto her finger.
“To me, it’s priceless.”
I never forgot that sentence.
The Funeral
The funeral itself had been beautiful.
At least that was what I tried to tell myself.
There were dozens of photographs of my mother.
Her wedding picture.
A photograph of her holding me as a baby.
One of her laughing in the backyard with a garden hose in her hand.
One of her at my college graduation.
Another of her sitting beside my father on their twenty-fifth anniversary.
She looked happy in almost every photograph.
That was the hardest part.
She looked so alive.
And the person in those pictures would never walk into the room again.
People came to offer condolences.
Some cried.
Some hugged me tightly.
Some told me stories about my mother that I'd never heard before.
An old friend told me my mother had once driven forty minutes in a storm to bring medicine to her sick child.
A former coworker told me my mother had anonymously paid for his certification exam when he couldn't afford it.
A neighbor said my mother used to leave bags of groceries outside her door without ever taking credit.
I listened to each story and cried.
Not because they were surprising.
Because every story sounded like her.
And somehow, hearing how many lives she'd touched made losing her feel even larger.
Then, after the service, everyone returned to my mother's house.
I had been dreading that part.
Her house looked exactly the same.
Her slippers were still beside the sofa.
Her reading glasses were still on the table.
A half-finished crossword puzzle sat beside a cup of tea she would never drink.
The smell of her perfume lingered in the hallway.
I kept expecting to hear her.
Instead, I heard my sister-in-law.
“The ring.”
She had cornered me near the dining room.
My older brother was in the kitchen speaking with relatives.