Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [29]
I didn’t want to leave her side, but sitting there in that room, my emotions flattened: I no longer felt love. I no longer felt hate. I felt nothing. It made me even sicker to my stomach than I already was.
That nothingness scared the shit out of me. I needed to go to Madeline, to hold her, to be with her, to know that my world hadn’t totally imploded. To feel love again. To know that I was capable of doing so. If anyone could revive these emotions, it was going to be Madeline. The need to see her was sudden. I didn’t think about it; I was compelled to go to her, because in that moment I knew that she was all I had, and I knew that if I was going to survive this day or any of the days that followed, she was going to be the reason.
When I walked out of the room, I saw the grief counselor again, but I no longer had the urge to knock her teeth out. Even my anger toward her had simply disappeared. “Matt,” she began, “I need you to complete an inventory of the things Liz had with her in her hospital room.” I followed her across the hall. I could see Liz from where I was, and I could see her mom and dad in there with her, but I turned my head away to keep from losing it again. I scanned the inventory list. Clothes, laptop, jewelry. I stopped. I hadn’t seen Liz’s rings in weeks. “Where are her fucking rings?” I yelled to anyone who would listen. This sudden outburst was a revival of my emotions, but not the one I wanted. I was scared. I started to sweat. They meant the world to her.
Liz loved her rings. Of course they were symbolic of our unending relationship, but she also admired them for the sheer beauty they possessed. She was as proud of them as I was of the fact that I’d actually figured out how to pay for them without her help. She knew how difficult it had been for me to afford them, which made her appreciate them more than if I’d been rich enough to put the Hope Diamond on her finger, and she treated them with the kind of care practiced by a chemist mixing potentially volatile chemicals. Liz took them to a jeweler at least monthly to have them cleaned, and she cleaned them at home almost weekly. She’d call me every time a barista or client complimented her on the brilliantly sparkling rocks that made the rings so gorgeous. “I always tell them that I have an amazing husband,” she’d say.
At that moment, the only thing I cared about was finding the rings. I started tearing through everything in the room, frantically looking for Liz’s prized possessions. While searching, my thoughts went to her funeral for the first time. The rings were a symbol of our lifelong commitment to one another, and that didn’t end with death—I was certain that she needed to be buried with them. But then I thought about what Liz would really want. She would tell me that they were too pretty to bury, and that burying them would be a supreme waste of money. And she would be right—I was still making payments on the loan I took out to pay for them. Besides, some crooked funeral director would probably steal them after we left the funeral home anyway. But more than anything, I thought about our daughter and how much her mother’s rings would mean to her someday. Though we promised to wear them forever, I couldn’t bury them with Liz. They belonged to Madeline now, and I knew that Liz would agree with my decision.
After a few minutes of frenzied and fruitless searching, I saw Anya standing in the doorway. “Do you have any idea where Liz’s rings could be? Maybe she told you where she put them or something?”
“Matt,” Anya said gently, “I put them in her purse.”
I found Liz’s giant black leather purse buried under a pile of her clothes. I rifled through it, finding an old package of gum, a couple of pens, two airplane barf bags, a packet of Zofran, and whole bunch of other stuff, but no rings. I thought to myself what I always said to Liz when she asked me to get something from