Now that’s an eternity ring
Back on her finger after 28 years
Kaye Gates remembers the last time she saw her engagement ring.
In early 1988, she wandered down to her local jewellers in Lower Hutt, carrying her beloved ring after she’d bent it out of shape during a particularly robust day landscaping her garden.
She thought she’d get it back in a few days, maybe a week. She couldn’t have imagined she wouldn’t see it for another 28 years.
Soon after she handed that piece of jewellery in, the jewellers’ workshop was burgled and her ring disappeared.
She kept an eye out over the years, occasionally strolling through antique and secondhand shops on the off-chance it would reappear, but without much hope.
Last week, everything changed. ‘‘I was trawling through Trade Me for no real reason. I was looking around and then I decided to take a look at the jewellery.
‘‘I scrolled down and one jumped out that was exactly like mine. I was absolutely gobsmacked.’’
She wasn’t completely sure if the ring was hers – it had been 28 years since she’d last laid eyes on it, after all – but she was confident enough to drop $360 to buy it on the spot.
Yesterday morning, it turned up. Her daughter rushed out to meet the courier and hurriedly carried a small cardboard box inside. Mother and daughter opened it together, crossing their fingers that it was the right one. It was. The ring’s return after so many years brought tears and a flood of recollections. Gates, who married husband John in Invercargill in 1967, still remembers the first time he put it on her finger.
‘‘When we got it, my husband and I hopped in a taxi to go and show it to my grandmother,’’ she said. ‘‘He put it on my finger in that taxi for the very first time. The driver was so touched he refused to let us pay him.’’
Through the years the couple have been together, their time has been marked by both joy and sadness. The ring was stolen just nine months after their daughter was killed in a car crash.
John is not well these days, suffering from Alzheimer’s and living in a care home down the road from his wife.
Her ring’s return has brought back memories from a different time. ‘‘It feels,’’ she said, ‘‘like bringing part of him back to me.’’
‘‘I scrolled down and one jumped out that was exactly like mine. I was absolutely gobsmacked.’’ Kaye Gates on finding her stolen engagement ring online