While It’s Still Possible by Sherry Stratton

Photo by author

I knew Mom couldn’t remove her wedding and engagement rings. Literally, could not get them off: the knuckle of her ring finger was swollen way beyond the size of the rings. Her other knuckles were swollen too, to varying degrees, and some of her fingers were crooked. She never commented on the state of her hands except to sometimes mention about the rings. She complained only that the arthritis was a nuisance, apologizing for her slowness sorting her bridge hand. We saw the trouble she had holding onto the thirteen cards. I never heard her speak of the pain, but her fingers must have hurt. I know this because mine are starting to hurt. 

One day I got the idea that I wanted photographs of her hands, so I could remember. The pictures would inform a vow I was making to myself (a vow I’ve already violated) to be as uncomplaining as Mom. She agreed cheerfully when I asked, and didn’t inquire why I wanted them. As I posed her hands at various angles, together and one at a time, I felt like an X-ray technician. I thought about Mom’s latest fall – one of many – when she had injured a hand. At Urgent Care, they took X-rays to check for a fracture in her thumb. The language in the radiology report was almost poetic. There is a lucency within the central distal aspect of the thumb. This could represent an undisplaced fracture, but evaluation was limited by “severe underlying osteoarthrosis.” The report went on to speak of “periarticular osteophytes and overlapping osseous bodies. Ulnar deviation at the index and long finger PIP joints. Apparent ankylosis of the ring finger DIP joint, suggesting an underlying inflammatory or crystalline process with secondary degenerative changes.” And there was more along those same lines. The possible fracture, it seemed, was the least of it.  

Her last eighteen years, Mom had lived as a widow. She died, at age 97, four months after I took the pictures. (By then I had already been five years a widow myself.) Just as Mom had told us, we could not get her rings over that swollen knuckle. (The funeral director, however, knew a trick.) 

It was a year or so later when I felt stiffness in my left ring finger and took a look. The knuckle had popped out to twice its usual size. I tried to remember if I’d done something to it, but didn’t think so. I figured that whatever had caused the sudden swelling would resolve, and the joint would return to normal. When that didn’t happen, I decided to get it X-rayed: a baseline record, just to keep track. But I knew it was something Mom would never have done. I was complaining already, “making a fuss,” as she would have put it. 

Lately, the same swelling has occurred in my right hand. The rheumatologist I see for something else is now zeroing in on my hands, taking X-rays every couple of years. During the last exam, she suggested I might have “erosive” osteoarthritis, a form that not all experts agree even exists. I told her about my mother’s severe arthritis and the pictures I’d taken. She said, “Do you have them?” I did, and she wanted to see. As the Doc looked over the photos on my phone, I told her, I’m becoming my mom. 

She ordered another round of X-rays, and they showed my arthritis worsening overall, with some “erosive” indications. Surely, I thought, Mom had that too. I was equally sure she would not have been interested in giving it the attention of steady X-raying and fancy diagnoses.

In my jewelry box I keep my wedding ring and my late husband’s, side by side, along with another ring he gave me. One late night recently I tried putting them on and couldn’t. I stood staring at the rings I had once worn. They looked impossibly small, as if they could not be mine. Even Dick’s ring wouldn’t fit over the knuckle of my ring finger, left or right. 

I had stopped wearing my wedding ring two years after becoming a widow. It was time. I didn’t know that I was removing it while it was still possible. 

Formerly a technical writer, Sherry Stratton now focuses on subjects close to her heart. Her short essay “Drawing Blood” was published in Minerva Rising Press’s The Keeping Room in 2024. Her work has also appeared in Leaping Clear, Punctuate, Portage, the Center for Humans & Nature, and elsewhere. Recently she was named a finalist in Frontier Poetry’s Tanka Challenge. Sherry is editor of DuPage Sierran and was copy editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal for eight years until the magazine’s close. She lives beside a forest preserve in northeastern Illinois.