DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

My dearest daughter, now 40, let me know this past year that she is longing to have my mother's wedding rings. This was a surprise to me. I thought they were too old fashioned for her liking, and that she had her eye on a gold one with a ruby and two diamonds.

This morning opened up, and allowed me the grace of saying good bye to those diamond studded rings, of wrapping the package with as much ritual as I could, and composing a letter to go along with them. My heart is heavy with the awareness of the journey of those stones to reach my mother's finger in 1927, coming from squalid conditions in African diamond mines, dug by black men suffering hunger, poverty and loneliness. In the U.S., they indicated prosperity, and she worn them until her death in 1969. Then they come to me, who also wore one of them for many years, and now to they'll grace another woman's finger, who will no doubt pass them on to one of her beautiful daughters.

To me diamonds represent the pressure under which women live their lives. My mother served my father every single day, though he wouldn't allow her to work, or buy property, and physically abused her, even while he travelled, womanized and lived a life of relative freedom and wealth. They raised three children "together," my mother hiring a nanny for me, as the youngest, so she could continue her socialite role as the wife of a bank president, CEO, and general wheeler dealer. Years later, I watched her tear up the divorce papers he sent her because, she said, the dates were wrong on their marriage. She never let him go legally or emotionally.

I wore the wedding ring, with it's tiny diamonds all the way around, with a certain ambivalence. It seemed to carry such a tragic story, that eventually I tucked them both away, to be retrieved for memory, but not for use. But my daughter has no energetic connection to the rings' history, and she may find them a delight to her eyes and inspiration to her heart.

I believe the soul, if it could be viewed by a human eye, would look like a living diamond; that is, sparkling, shooting rainbows, and streaking out light into the atmosphere on its own, whether an external light is present or not. And the more we nurture our souls, the brighter our radiance becomes. Perhaps my mother will know me by my radiance when I arrive on the Other Side. We carry so much deeper understandings now than we did when she was alive: diamonds are forever.