7/18/24

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

On the evening of Michael’s accident, on January 17^th, 2024, I was handed four or five plastic bags filled with his things as he was moved from the ER to the ICU. I was also given his wallet, cell phone, and his keys. Totally overwhelmed with what I’d been told and what I’d seen in the ER, I grasped the bags, carried them to my car, then moved my car to another part of the hospital parking system which had easier access to the ICU. It was well after visiting hours, but I was being allowed back in, along with my daughter and son. I knew it was important to have his wallet, phone, and his keys. I didn’t pay any attention to anything else.

Much later, after dropping off my daughter and son at their respective apartments, I went home alone. Alone. I carried the bags inside, left them in the classroom, went upstairs to get the dog and take her out, and then I sat for I don’t know how long, staring into space, trying to figure out just what the hell happened. Eventually, I moved into action, emailing students and clients, trying to figure out how to get a hold of Michael’s boss to let her know he wouldn’t be coming in to work. I remember searching through MATC’s website, trying to find a number to call, calling two of them, and then going through Michael’s phone, recognizing a name as someone he worked with, and calling her, even though by that point, it was after one in the morning.

Somewhere around two in the morning, I went down to the classroom and opened the bags. There was the gym bag that he carried back and forth every day, dirtied, torn in places, the zipper broken. There were all of his clothes, all of them, from his jacket down to his socks, all in tatters from having been cut off of his body by the paramedics. Nothing was whole. Everything was in pieces.

I never ever want to see and hear again what I saw in the ER that night. I never want to be given bags of tatters again.

It was around about then that I realized I didn’t have Michael’s wedding ring.

Michael’s ring was very important to him. I wrote this blog back in December of 2021 about Michael losing his ring in Woodman’s as he checked out our groceries at the self-checkout. He got the manager to look at the video and confirm that he had it on his finger when he began checking out, but didn’t by the end, so the ring had to be there. He tore through and unloaded everything in the grocery bags he’d just packed up, and the manager took apart the register, and then Michael came home in tears because the ring was missing. We’d been married 21 years by then. I rarely thought of my ring – it was just a fixture on my finger. But Michael was horrified.

We did get a call the next day from Woodman’s – the ring was found and was waiting for us at the front desk. We went straight from picking it up to the jewelers to get it resized. Michael had lost weight and the ring was loose on his finger. He was determined to never lose it again.

To see the blog about Michael losing his wedding ring in 2021, look here: https://www.kathiegiorgio.org/12-23-21/

And now it was missing. And my husband was lying in the ICU, unconscious, with so many injuries, I couldn’t keep track of them, including the one with the really scary name: traumatic brain injury.

When I arrived back at the hospital the next morning, the first thing I did, after making sure he was still breathing, was check his finger. His ring was not there. And thus began my obsession with finding Michael’s ring.

I called the ER. Several times. They assured me, over and over, that they inventoried everything that came in with Michael, and there was no ring. I called the police. Several times. They didn’t have it, and they encouraged me to call the ambulance company. I called the ambulance company. Several times. They assured me they scoured the very ambulance he was on, several times, and there was no ring.

I wondered if it was in the gutter in the intersection where he was hit by the minivan, then run over. Despite the obsession, I knew I could not handle going there, standing where he did on his last moments of a normal life.

As soon as Michael was conscious enough to talk, even when he was still calling me his sister and not his wife, I asked him where his ring was. He immediately looked at his left hand, now encased in these awful fat white mittens that kept him from pulling out the tubes that were keeping him alive. “Take,” he said, holding his hand out to me. “Take.”

“I can’t take them off, hon,” I said. “But your ring isn’t on your finger. Where is your ring?”

He just looked away. At that point, Michael didn’t even believe he was married. He thought he was 23 years old.

The search for the ring continued for all of Michael’s time between January 17 and June 19, as he tried so hard to recover. When he was home, I said, “Michael, have you remembered where your ring is?”

His response was always to look at his finger and then tear up. “I don’t know,” he said.

I was determined to find it and restore it to him.

I was talking with his sister at one point during this, and she told me that when Michael visited Omaha at Christmastime, a trip that was my gift to him for his birthday and for the holiday, she noticed he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring.

That puzzled me. Michael always wore his ring. But then I remembered that Michael had carpal tunnel and cubital tunnel surgeries in October. Again, before the accident. He would have taken his ring off for the surgery, as it was on his left hand and arm.

That day in October, I didn’t drive him to the surgery center as I had clients that morning. Olivia drove him, dropped him off, then returned to pick him up. If Michael hadn’t remembered to take his ring off before the surgery, he might have tucked it in a pocket or given it to a nurse before he went into the operating room. I’d already gone through all of his pockets, even in clothes he hadn’t worn for years. No ring.

Maybe it was at the medical center, a medical center in a different town and one I’d never been to before. But with everything that went on during Michael’s last months, I never made the phone call to see if it was there.

So Michael died without his wedding ring.

This week, I messaged our doctor, asking if he could give me the phone number of the surgical center where Michael had his surgery. I explained why I needed it. I was told they couldn’t give me the number directly because of HIPPA (ridiculous!), but I could call patient relations. Before I did, I had a conversation with a student who is a psychic. She said she saw Michael smiling, holding up a coffee mug that had Muse, our cat’s, face on it. Muse died shortly before Michael.

“Can you look for the ring in your coffee mugs?” she asked.

I told her that I’d just finished cleaning out and reorganizing every cabinet in my kitchen. “It’s not there,” I said. “And Michael didn’t drink coffee.”

Later that afternoon, I remembered my daughter Olivia saying, just a couple days before, that while I’d finished the cabinets, I never did the drawers.

In our kitchen, there is a bit of counter between the stove and the living room wall. It was “Michael’s counter”. He put his stuff for work there. There was a drawer with the counter, which housed our big spoons and other kitchen utensils. But Michael sometimes used it to drop extraneous things in. Receipts. Pens. Stuff that didn’t belong there and drove me nuts.

I’d already looked in that drawer for the ring. But I hadn’t taken everything out.

I decided it was worth a shot. As I pulled things out, I remembered how, when I checked it the first time, I’d removed a lot of things that didn’t belong there. Paperclips. Receipts. Change. Needles for his diabetic pens. What I pulled out now was what did belong there. Large spoons. Slotted spoons. A ladle. A spaghetti scooper.

I would give anything to have his sloppy drawer back.

As I removed the last thing, I felt pretty dejected, but also felt like shrugging and saying it was as I expected. But then I bent down and looked into the back of the drawer. I couldn’t see back there unless I bent down and stared.

And that’s when I saw the glint of gold.

In the back right corner, all the way back, there was the ring.

I pulled it out, and, true to form lately, I burst into tears. Then, I pulled off my own wedding ring from my finger, put Michael’s on, and then slid my ring after it, so I could wear them together, without having to worry about the larger ring falling off.

The rings touched. They rested. Side by side.

Just as it should be. Something was as it should be. I felt like I was given a little bit of Michael back. An important part. The part that connected us together, for almost 25 years now.

“I found it,” I said to the urn. “It’s right here.”

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.