Wedding Rings, Thanksgiving and Other Holiday Hurdles

Holidays

As we approach Thanksgiving (and the other December holidays although this piece’s focus is Thanksgiving given its proximity), it is worth pausing to acknowledge that for many, the holidays are hard.

Don’t I know.

I’ve written about this for years. Thanksgiving was a holiday that caused more grief than pleasure in my orbit for decades: disputes, snark, jockeying for superiority, dyregulation, dissociation …. And I felt the impending gloom of the Thanksgiving horror show starting weeks in advance.

And thankfully, that era, which included the air sucking presence of my abusive biological mother, has passed. I now thrive at Thanksgiving with my logical mother and sister and my biological son. And in those in between years, between hell and heaven, my late husband and son (and his significant other when there was one) and I would happily celebrate Thanksgiving as a threesome or foursome; sometimes, we were together with friends and neighbors. I often cooked. My specialty: cranberry sauce with oranges and nuts and brandy, all mixed together.

The Missing Person

Often, there are guests who cannot attend a Thanksgiving meal for any number of reasons. Some reasons seem good; others are well or poorly designed subterfuges. The reasons include geographic distance, work commitments, natural disasters and weather barriers, and a lack of desire to navigate the assembled crowd. Add to that: there are guests who choose (or are forced by family pressure and guilt) to attend and more or less absent themselves while there physically; they are miserable, with their misery on display for all to see and witness.

Yup, Hallmark and lots of advertising portray a holiday ensemble that front faces as jubilant beyond jubilant. And we need to be mindful that Hallmark misses many homes. Hallmark doesn’t show many actual holiday scenarios … scenarios lived in real time with real people.

The Elephant

Then, there are folks/families who lost a loved one or two and for which this will be the first Thanksgiving without them. (This happens every year, more during the Pandemic.) And while it often presents as death, a relationship fracture can be devastating too. That previously occupied chair, howsoever emptied, now sits there mighty vacant.

It is in this context that I want to talk about what one does with one’s wedding ring when one is widowed. This ties into Thanksgiving and other holidays and anniversaries. Work with me here; the connection is imminent. I’ll get there.

There are many options as to what to do with that wedding ring one wore after death of one’s spouse or partner (assuming one wore one in the first place). No option has superiority over another. And there are likely many approaches to “wedding ring post death behavior,” deeply rooted in religion and culture and gender and economics, among other sources. Psychological readiness for “ring events” obviously plays a central role.

Whether we move the marital ring from the left hand to the right hand on the 4th finger in the US (unless one is European and signaling marriage), whether we wear it on a chain around our neck, whether we put it carefully and/or safely in a drawer or safe, whether we carry it in our purse or pocket or backpack, whether we hand it down for future generations or whether we up cycle it into a new piece of jewelry that can be worn again and again, we are mastering the past and finding a pathway forward through our decisions and behaviors.

Might I suggest that if one seeks to begin a journey forward and process a marriage that ended in death (I was married for 39 years but I round up to 40 for ease and the last 8 years were marred by Alzheimer’s), it is wise to remove one’s wedding ring (assuming the death of a spouse was not last week) during the Thanksgiving dinner. (Other holiday dinners/gatherings too.)

What?

Why?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to share one’s grief with the assembled crowd of friends and family by wearing one’s wedding ring for all to see? Wouldn’t the presence of one’s wedding ring on one’s 4th finger of one’s left hand (or where so ever one wore it before) show how much the deceased was loved and is profoundly missed still?

Nope, at least as I see it and have lived it in my own life and with others, informed of course, by my knowledge of and expertise in trauma. That “keep the ring on” approach is actually not how we show past/current love and someone’s being missed. (That is unless one wants to stay where one is, grounded in the past and wearing it proudly or sadly. One can choose not to move forward; I know people for whom this is their desired endgame. They will stay married to a dead person for decades.)

Here are the why’s and what’s and when’s….if moving forward and embracing a full life (including perhaps a new relationship) is one’s goal.

Memory

Our capacity to talk about a loved one who has died, our capacity to share stories of Thanksgiving’s past, the presence and continuity of longstanding traditions: these are all very good ways of move from what was into what now is. There is a hole for sure; fill it with memories.

Add to this: Many people attending a Thanksgiving dinner want to see that a widow or widower is trying to move forward. That journey can’t start visibly to others in attendance if one is wearing one’s wedding ring from a marriage that ended in death. (It’s akin to never changing a thing in one’s home(s) post-death as if permanence is the signature of lasting love. Oh my. Seen that, tried to explain that. Folks cannot move forward if they are actually married to the past.

We ring wearers keep the ring on our fingers as a reminder, until we can effectively process grief and lock both good and bad memories regarding the departed and the ended relationship among two living people into our psychic place. Not to oversimplify the psychological processing of grief and understanding memory becoming fixed, but when resolution hasn’t happened and memories aren’t secure, we wear that wedding ring as a reminder.

Think, if rings were never your thing, about artifacts that can’t or won’t be moved or changed post-death. Ponder a naturalist’s preservation of artificial plastic flowers from the 60’s in his home that adorn a sideboard and collect dust because his now dead wife adored them. The plastics could go in favor of real blooming flowers but they don’t go because they are symbols of unprocessed grief surrounding a now gone life. The internal discussion is: if I take away the flowers, I lose the memory of the home my dead wife and I had together. OMG. Let’s just say that a guest seeing those flowers is immediately put on notice: Why are those awful anachronisms there still? Really? In a world where one talks about nature and preservation, a person is preserving fake plastic flowers? Sadly, seen this up close.

So, it is vastly more comforting for others (more on self momentarily) if they can see hope in the widowed person. And taking that symbolic ring off to give thanks is powerful too, including for the person widowed. Thanks doesn’t require a ring from an ended marriage; it requires an openness to our enormous human capacity to move forward and a showing of that willingness to others and, importantly, to oneself.

So help those around you and help yourself by taking that widower/ widow wedding ring off, even if only for a few hours during the Thanksgiving gathering and then put it back on if needed to go to bed (and to sleep) alone in the near term. Message to yourself and your gathered family and friends that moving forward is the goal, howsoever hard. And give thanks for what was, what is and what can be.

Bottom line: Don’t lose the ring; remove the ring. One isn’t removing the relationship when the ring is removed; in fact, we know the relationship memories endure if and when they are processed. It’s not the ring that does the trick. And for the record, the same issues occur during the December holidays and on New Year Eve ….

And, to my readers near and far and in-between: Happy Thanksgiving to all… howsoever and wheresoever you choose to both remember and embrace our individual and collective tomorrows. My wedding beautiful rings are in a box in my home, awaiting up cycling when I am ready. As such, and to be clear and blunt, they do not adore my fingers. Other rings now rest on my fingers, symbols of moving forward.