Trying to Connect My Daughter to My Late Mother and Grandmother

"Sweetheart, I'm sorry, they didn't."

"OK.”

My dad arrived home that night with my blanket, a gentle smile on his lips.

"I knew you were disappointed and I couldn't let it go,” he said. “I had the guys search the dumpster and they found it just before it all went to the tip."

I didn't hear that the belongings Daniel and I had grown up alongside — toys I forgot to ask for, Mum's owl teapot — were in a dumpster ready to be discarded with all the lonely things no one wants. I heard that my dad made sure he rescued my baby blanket.

Days after I had celebrated my 30th birthday in my New Jersey home with my husband, Jase, and our young children, I was getting ready to go to watch our eldest two kids in their elementary school winter concert. We'd moved to America six years prior, and today he had taken off work for the concert. The phone rang. It was my dad.

"Jo, darling, let me speak to Jase.” I knew something awful had happened. I gave the phone to Jase and waited. My grandma had died in a fire at her home.

In England for the funeral, we went to Grandma's house. Daniel, Jase and I breathed in the acrid odor of freshly extinguished fire. We looked at the damage. I had lost relics from my mother's life that I had assumed would one day be mine. I had lost the weekly letters I had sent her since Mum had died. Years of letters documenting my life, letters that Grandma saved. We found a trophy in an upstairs bedroom awarded to my mum for a university rally car race: first-place navigator. Blackened by smoke, the base warped by heat, I took it as a minor win. There were no major wins to be had.

At the funeral, the undertaker gave me Grandma's rings.

"The stone burned right out of this one, the heat from the fire."

My uncle overheard and told me that actually the stone, a sapphire, had been missing for some time. There were two rings, and my cousin Sarah let me choose first. I chose the one with the missing stone. I don't know why I was drawn to the incompleteness of it. Perhaps I was attracted to a tangible problem I could fix. I went back to America with Jase and the kids, my mum's smoky trophy, the stoneless ring and the feelings of loss and guilt. I should have called more. I should have written more. I should have done more.

The basement leak cleaned up, I brought Grandma's ring upstairs. I sat at the dining room table. A simple design, the band was thin gold, and the empty prongs silver and bent. It was too big for me, hanging loosely around my third finger. My 15-year-old daughter, Grace, sat with me. She was my mother's double: high cheekbones, auburn hair and freckles. She tried the ring on. It fit her perfectly.

The jeweler took his time to restore the ring, rebuilding the setting and selecting a sapphire. I collected it days before Grace's 16th birthday. I decided to give it to her to keep safely in her room, which in itself felt like a trust fall.

"It's beautiful,” she said, slipping it on. Before I explained that she wasn't to wear it out of the house, she was heading for the door.

"Let me take a picture of you.” I didn't add the implied, “in case I never see the ring again.” I could insist she leave the ring at home and be satisfied it wouldn't be lost. Or I could let her go.

Watching her leave, my stomach churned. I wanted to get the ring back in its new black box, tiny gold clasp turned, back inside the labeled Ziploc, in the waterproof tote in the basement. But I didn't. In the 18 months since I gave her the ring, she has worn it every single day — to school, the beach, parties, horseback riding. And every night when she goes to bed, she is still wearing it. She hasn't lost it yet, but I know she might. If it gets lost, it will reignite the smoldering embers of my bigger losses, but I am at peace with that. To see Grace, looking so much like my mother, wearing my grandmother's ring is important enough for me to risk the keepsake that has connected us all.