Kitabı oku: «The Personals», sayfa 2
A Ringless Marriage
Vintage wedding and engagement ring for sale; €2,000 or nearest offer. Comes with valuation. DoneDeal, July 2018
I’m early and have parked outside a house in the west of Ireland. I’m sitting in my car waiting for the owner of the above rings to arrive home. Someone is knocking on my car window and wants to lead me into the house. As I follow, a large Alsatian appears and eyes me from inside the open front door. Just then a Land Rover pulls into the drive and a woman gets out, brushes past me and quickly closes the door before the Alsatian bolts. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, before adding casually, ‘That dog bites.’ She half chides the man who let the dog out, before asking if I want tea or coffee and clearing a space at the kitchen table for us to sit.
I notice that the man is quite self-conscious and I also notice that she’s overseeing his tea making, or at least subtly checking each step while trying not to make it obvious that she is doing so. The kitchen is cluttered – managed clutter, I’d call it – and even though the house is on a main road in a village, outside are a collection of sheds and outbuildings, bales of hay and fields. I’m guessing that they grew up on farms, and this is their way of keeping one foot in the fields, living on the side of a busy road, yet constructing a mini farmyard out back.
There’s a nervousness in the room and some tension. I don’t sense that it’s caused by me or my microphone. I think it’s more the fact that their space is now shared with someone else and they’re very conscious of that. As cups of coffee are served the man gets closer to me without saying anything, as if he is afraid to say the wrong thing. And then I notice the box on the windowsill behind the sink. Every day of the month has a little window and some are open, advent calendar like, while others are unopened. Inside are red and white pills, and the day and date is printed on each little portal.
Something clicks, and I’m taken back to an interview I’d done years earlier beside a mountain in Tipperary, with a man and his mother, who was in the final stages of dementia. She kept pleading with me to take her away because she believed he was poisoning her. He wasn’t, of course. In reality he was keeping her alive, and had sacrificed much of his own life to ensure his mother could stay in her own home as long as possible. Her illness meant that she took her anger and frustration out on him every day. She kept saying to me over and over, pointing to imaginary marks on her body: ‘Look what he did to me ... look.’ And there they lived, together and alone at the foot of a mountain; mother and adult son entwined in their love and false hate, their reality and their fiction. Long after I’d driven away from the house they were still with me. They are in my mind now in this half farmhouse, where two adults are reframing their relationship, forgotten fragment by forgotten fragment.
The man’s wife tells me that his dementia and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been a relatively recent discovery, or more accurately, that she didn’t know her husband had been diagnosed until recently. ‘I felt there was something going on,’ she says. ‘He was short-tempered and not totally focused on certain chores we would share. He wouldn’t do them, or he would forget where the keys were. Those things didn’t come in one day – it was over a period of a week. The biggest thing that made me go to the doctor with him was the fact that he wasn’t concerned about how he was dressed. He would forget things. More and more he would forget where keys were or that he put milk in the fridge without using it; silly little things really.’
Throughout these changes her husband didn’t seem particularly bothered, she says. When he got frustrated, he would lose his temper a little and it could be over the smallest of things. For example, if she asked him if he’d put the kettle on and make coffee, he might get a little hot-tempered and react by saying he was always doing it. She believes now that he has had dementia since 2016, and that Alzheimer’s developed after that. He is aware that he has Alzheimer’s, but doesn’t accept that the change in his life is due to the condition. There should be a lot more help and support for families like theirs, she says, and sometimes she feels alone and abandoned by state services. There are practical things that need to be done, such as signing the house over to their children, which he is reluctant to do.
‘He is changing into someone else,’ she says. ‘I could put my arms around him today and say, “I love you”. I could whisper in his ear that we had a great life and sometimes his response will be more measured. He might agree and say, “Remind me again how many years we are together?” But I could do the same thing later in the day, especially in bed, and he will push me away and say, “Stop that now, I have to sleep.” It’s hard to know how he will react sometimes.’
She says he can be very curt and sharp with her, and often if she is upset or crying he won’t stop what he’s doing to ask how she is and will simply walk by, oblivious to her feelings. She tries to continue to treat him as normally as she can, especially in front of other people. It would hurt him if she treated him any differently. Increasingly, she has been taking him with her when she has to leave the house. This is partly because it’s good for him to get out and about and not isolate himself, but also, at least when he is with her she knows he is safe and won’t wander down the road or leave the door open.
Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’
She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.
‘He was the kind of man that if anything in the house needed mending, he was on top of it,’ she says. ‘Now, if a radiator leaks, he will say, “I will fix it” and often it will be leaking even more afterwards. If I say anything, he will blame me for it and tell me to do it myself. I’m telling you all this because it’s not easy and there are significant challenges, and it’s heart-breaking to see someone you love change so much.’
As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’
The box contained two rings. One was an engagement ring made of 18 carat white gold. To my untrained eye it looked more like yellow gold, but most people would describe it simply as a diamond cluster ring. The wedding ring was also 18 carats, again white gold, and it was more modest than the engagement ring. Both came with their certificates and valuation forms. While she’s connected to them emotionally, I don’t get the sense that they are treasured deeply. There’s something in the way she holds them in her hand – the casualness perhaps, or the fact that there’s a firm-handedness in her movements with the rings. When I suggest this, she corrects me. ‘They do mean an awful lot to me,’ she says, ‘but I can’t keep them because I think they are better off on somebody’s finger, rather than just shutting them away in a safe.’
When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t live together. The marriage was very difficult when they were living together but they became best of friends after they divorced.’
We’re talking here about the mid-1970s, when the seller’s mother had remarried. At that stage, she had been separated from her first husband for about six years. Sadly, she passed away some years ago in a nursing home in England, while the seller’s father moved to Eastern Europe, where he also remarried. While they were both alive, they had kept in touch. And the last time her mother and father actually met each other? ‘It was at my brother’s funeral,’ she tells me. ‘He had a heart attack and died suddenly. My father came home and he stayed alongside my mother at the funeral, sitting really close beside her. It was clear the connection was still there. I think they both had the same type of character and personality – the same type of short fuse.’
Telling me the story of her parents’ divorce and their subsequent friendliness towards each other, she says she doesn’t want to over-romanticise it. It’s not just the story of two people thrown together and then pulled apart and yet still there for each other at the end. Her parents had separated after a period of time when the arguments between them became worse as their children moved through their teenage years. She doesn’t want to go into it too much, but those years left their mark and did have an impact on her in later years. Luckily, when her mother remarried, her daughter always got on very well with her stepfather. She describes him as a fantastic man, and totally in love with her mother.
‘He was a gentleman. A small man. Very, very polite and very gentle,’ she says. ‘He loved my mother so much. He would do anything for her. When she started getting ill, he gave up his job and he waited on her hand and foot. He would buy her anything, take her wherever she wanted to go. And when she had to go to a nursing home, he gave up work and went and sat with her every single day. He absolutely idolised her.’
When the man had given her mother the engagement and wedding rings now on the table in front of me, what did she do with them if she didn’t wear them? ‘She had a chain,’ her daughter tells me, ‘which I have, and she put the two rings on a silver chain and put it around her neck. And she went through the rest of her life with no rings on her fingers. I also have her first wedding rings. These ones are too valuable to be just left in a safe. To me these two rings are beautiful but I don’t feel the same connection with them as her first wedding rings. I idolised my stepfather but he has also given me the right and the blessing to sell them.’
The rings are now for sale for €2,000. She would be thrilled to get €1,500 for them and to know that they have been given a new lease of life. I tell her I admire her for putting them up for sale. Her mother had made a defiant stance in not wearing them and she is now making another by selling them. Why be weighed down by the past? If she does succeed in selling them, the money is already accounted for, she tells me. ‘I will buy my mother a little plaque which has a mother’s verse on it and I want to put it on her grave from her children.’
So far she’s had a few offers but won’t let the rings go for much below the asking price. I ask her finally whether she’d ever talked to her parents about the years she lived with them when they were having difficulties in their marriage. ‘I did,’ she tells me, ‘I spoke to my father. I didn’t get a chance to speak to my mother. He always said he would keep a special place in his heart for my mother and he respected her and he said it was such a pity they could not live together. He is 86 years old now and lives in a different country, but he always advised me to never go to bed on a row.’
She keeps this in mind, even with the added difficulty of caring for her husband during his illness. The years ahead will be uncertain, so now feels the right time to break with the past, and move on. She’s hoping for the right buyer and will be slow to let the rings go to a dealer or speculator. ‘Even though my mother never wore these rings, there is a lot of happiness in them,’ she tells me. ‘They just need to find a home now.’
A Dress for the (Middle) Ages
For sale: beautiful medieval-style wedding dress. Never worn. Evening Echo, 2014
Jane lives in a small two-up, two-down in Cork city with her husband and two cats. She studied history at university but a series of illnesses meant that she had to give up her work as a part-time tutor. Two days a week she now works from home – a job, coincidentally, that she found through the classifieds. Jane always wanted a traditional church wedding, but her fiancé wanted something less conventional and more ‘out there’. They compromised and decided on a medieval-themed wedding in a church. Jane ordered her dress, a medieval satin designer gown, from a designer in the United States.
So far so good, but as the day of the wedding grew nearer, the pressure of getting married got to the couple. Ireland was still clawing its way out of recession and the lack of credit on offer from their bank meant they were worried about getting into more debt. Her fiancé had to travel long distances for work so they spent more and more time apart. After weeks of discussion the wedding was postponed.
As you can imagine, the couple and both their families were devastated. ‘My dress was made of cream velvet with large bell sleeves and a criss-cross design in the front and back,’ Jane explains. ‘We had it all planned and everything and for one reason and another it didn’t take place and we put off the wedding for a while.’
Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending and the couple ended up having a medieval blessing on Cape Clear Island in summer 2013. Jane wore a more casual medieval dress for the occasion and her husband dressed as a knight. He wore four patches of colours and a long gown and both arrived at the ceremony carrying large swords. The blessing came from an old Viking text and two ‘druids’ performed the ceremony using ancient stones. ‘We even have an official medieval certificate,’ says Jane. And even though they are both medieval enthusiasts, and her original wedding dress is now up for sale, she says she hasn’t given up hope of a more traditional church wedding at some point in the future. Maybe without the swords.
A Chance Encounter of a Shocking Kind
White gold band valued at €4,950. Will sell for €1,000. Also, 18-carat cluster diamond ring. Brand new, barely worn. Valued at €7,000. I will sell for €1,000. Evening Echo
Was €12,000 worth of jewellery for sale for €2,000? It seemed almost too good to be true. ‘I need the money because my son needs orthodontic treatment,’ the somewhat hesitant voice at the other end of the phone tells me. ‘So I thought, time to sell the rings.’
Even though reductions in value are expected in the classifieds, this seemed an extraordinary bargain. I was curious about the price drop, but also the fact that the ad had been placed in the Evening Echo and not online. Putting an ad like this online means adding pictures, while a print ad allows greater anonymity and a discreet sale. The words ‘brand new’ and ‘barely worn’ coupled with the low price gave me a strong feeling that there was a story to be told. Initially the seller wasn’t sure if she’d feel comfortable meeting me, but a few days after I made contact we did agree to meet.
The interview took place in the car park of a shopping centre and had taken half a dozen phone calls to arrange, including one from a friend of hers checking me out, before it was agreed. I’d given her my car description. When I got there, I scanned the faces exiting the shopping centre to see if I could pick her out from the crowd. Although I’m hopeless at this sort of thing, I find it a useful exercise to try to acknowledge any stereotypes or prejudices I may have before an encounter – even those I’m not conscious of holding.
The seller is a very private person, and it turns out that she has been through a lot in a short space of time. Her experiences have meant that her trust in people she doesn’t know, and even in people she does know, has been eroded and is pretty much shattered.
I’m guessing that she’s in her early forties and she’s of slim build and attractive, with a natural curiosity and an obvious intellect. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, remarking that this is all very strange and she doesn’t know quite what she’s doing here. On one level it is strange to sit in a car with someone you don’t know and tell them some of the more intimate details of your life. If I can’t meet people in their homes I tend to interview them in my car – sound-wise, it works well and there’s a nice informality to it. I sometimes ask interviewees to imagine that we’ve done the school run and met at the school gate and then they’ve sat in the car to shelter from the rain for a chat. Then off we go ....
The rings had been given to this woman by her former partner. The relationship ended a long time ago and in her own words, ‘Any emotional attachment is long gone.’ She says this in a way that’s definite, not as if she’s trying to convince herself of something, but stating it with certainty and with, to use that awful American phrase, a certain amount of ‘closure’.
She tells me that she was in a five-year relationship which produced two children, and as she begins to go into what happened, her hands clench tightly, perhaps mirroring the twist in her stomach, as she revisits what was an incredibly painful time.
She points to the entrance to the large shopping centre. One day, when her daughter was just one, this woman was walking through a clothing store. Another woman passed her and as she did so, she stared at her child. She could see that this passer-by was visibly taken aback. This woman said the child reminded her of her own toddler, who had died a few years previously. In fact, she said, ‘She is the spitting image of her.’ It was an odd encounter, but both parents chatted away and when the stranger asked her the child’s father’s name, things took an incredible turn.
‘I told her my partner’s name,’ she says. ‘And to my utter shock, she said that was the name of her partner and the father of her child also.’ I repeat this slowly so I can process it. ‘So out of the blue a woman walked up to you in the shopping centre opposite and said that your child reminded her of her own who had died?’ She nods, sharing my incredulity. ‘And then it turned out that the children shared a father and you knew nothing about this second family?’
She again nods her head in agreement at the unlikely coincidence. ‘I was dumbstruck,’ she tells me. ‘In that moment, I would possibly have overlooked the fact that he had had a previous relationship that he hadn’t told me about. But the fact that he had a child that died, and he didn’t tell me about it – that’s hugely traumatic.’
The second woman produced a photo of herself, her daughter who had died and the child’s father – all three of them together. ‘She was like my daughter’s twin sister,’ she tells me, before adding angrily, ‘How could he keep it a secret?’ When confronted, his excuse was that he had put his previous family to the back of his mind because of the trauma of losing his child. ‘It was something he wanted to forget about as if it didn’t happen,’ she says.
Some people choose to bury trauma and loss in this way and not share it with those closest to them. But by doing that, they run the risk of the trauma contaminating the good in their lives. While the person opposite me is humane, caring and compassionate, when she realised that her husband had had a previous family she knew nothing about, her first thoughts were not about how deeply his daughter’s death must have hurt him if he felt that he had to hide it; she was more concerned that he may have been keeping something else from her. ‘So, then I just said, no, let’s go our separate ways. This is too bizarre. I was heartbroken at the time, but I’m over it now. I think I dodged a bullet, to be honest.’
She’s reluctant to tell me much about her former partner. There is little contact between them now and the fallout from the revelation and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage have made her wary of people. She couldn’t contemplate continuing with the relationship once her trust had been broken so fundamentally. The rings, like her former marriage, mean very little to her now. The break-up of her marriage has had other implications, and finding things tough financially, she decided to put the rings up for sale. Any money she receives will be invested in her children’s future.
Despite the fact that she has been open about much of the detail, I have a sense that she is holding back large portions of her story. Perhaps this is a coping mechanism to prevent herself from being re-traumatised – and who could blame her?
Her phone flashes, signalling that her children are ready to be collected. I wish her well. Before she gets out of the car she turns to me: ‘See, I told you there was a story, didn’t I?’ she says, before opening the car door and running to embrace her younger child.
