My Wedding Ring

My Wedding Ring

By Deborah Esther Schifter

I no longer wear it on my finger. Instead, it’s around my neck, near my heart, together with Alan’s. I moved it last winter, but I miss it on my finger. There’s still a mark where it’s gone, a slight indentation, the color of the skin a little lighter.

I started wearing that ring as soon as we got married. Alan didn’t; I’m not sure exactly why. Was it a protest? Did he resent having this label out there for the world to see? He would put it on only when we’d visit his family or mine. I decided it was his business, his decision.

But I did notice that, after 16 years of marriage, he wore it when we took a six-month trip together, and then he didn’t take it off.

Just before we finished the trip, something else entered our lives. Falling was the first concerning event. The doctors said, don’t worry, it’s nothing serious. But each of us separately, not speaking about it, we knew something, something serious. When he started having trouble with speech—so subtle, I couldn’t hear it—the doctor still said, don’t worry. The tests came back negative. No problem.

But there was a problem. When did I know? I had anticipated it years and years ago, before there was any gap in the nerve. Was it a gap, or was it an extra substance?

Eventually, the doctor did show us a spot in the MRI. See? That little white smudge? That’s a lesion in the upper motor neuron center. Was it a hole or a tear or something present that’s not supposed to be there? Whatever it was, it was slowing the muscles.

When we first started spending time together 16 years earlier, I learned to adjust to Alan’s pace, slower than mine. But toward the end of the trip, I was suddenly feeling impatient again. It’s taking him forever to wash up and shave! Alan said to me, “We’re going to have trouble in my old age.” I knew exactly what he was saying: If I was getting impatient now—here he was, 15 years ahead of me, slowing down—what would it be like in 10 years, in 20 years? So I recalibrated, and learned to be patient again. A year and some months later, we realized it wasn’t just the process of aging. (He was only 64 years old at the time.) It was a disease that was going to slow him down more and more and more.

“Aging is a process of abstention.” That’s what he said as a joke when he was 55 and, having become lactose intolerant, had to abstain from cheese. He didn’t know then about all the abstentions to come—that he would abstain from walking, from raising his arms, from eating, from speaking (though he never did stop speaking completely—in the last month, he couldn’t formulate words and resorted to spelling; the last word out of his mouth was my name, which he didn’t spell, but could say—I didn’t know if he was calling out to me or answering a question or simply making a last connection) and then, finally, he abstained from breathing.