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My Dad’s Ring Belongs to the Goddess Now
In December of 2005, the night before Christmas Eve, both of my parents were killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. A few days later, I was making arrangements in a funeral parlor in Texas with my sister, her husband, and my ex. We were all young and not very rich, and when we heard how much it was going to cost to have our parents’ remains shipped back to Wichita Falls from the crematorium in Fort Worth over the holidays, we decided to drive the 114 miles to pick them up ourselves.
The address we were given was the service entrance, and when we rang the buzzer, the crematorium worker mistook us for a group of mortuary students. She opened the door and casually led us into a room where a man was being embalmed—an image that is permanently seared into my memory. When she realized we were there to pick up our parents, she apologized profusely and ushered us back into the alley. A few moments later, she met us out there with a pair of unremarkable cardboard boxes, roughly the size of bricks. As we were about to drive away, she came running out with something she had forgotten. It was a manila envelope full of jewelry: my mother’s tiny diamond studs, a silver ring I had made for her in a college art class, and the gold wedding bands that had been on each of their bodies for more than half of their lives, from their wedding day in 1976 until the moment just before…
