I opened the envelope slowly, letting them watch. Inside were photographs, printed from the funeral home’s own security cameras, and a short typed note from the funeral director explaining what his staff had witnessed and felt obligated to document. The images showed my three children, during the twenty minutes I had stepped away to greet arriving mourners, standing beside their mother’s open casket. They were not grieving. They were going through Eleanor’s jewelry, the pieces we had chosen to lay her to rest in, and one photograph caught my daughter slipping her mother’s wedding ring off her finger and into her purse. The ring I had placed on Eleanor’s hand fifty-five years earlier.<\/p>\n
The room went so silent I could hear the clock in the hallway. My daughter’s face crumpled. “Dad, it wasn’t, we were going to give it back,” she stammered, but the words fell apart because there was nothing beneath them. The funeral director, a decent man, had noticed the ring missing when he prepared Eleanor for burial, reviewed his own footage, and quietly handed me the envelope after the service, unwilling to accuse my children to my face on the worst day of my life. I had carried it home and hidden it, unable to bear looking, until the three of them stood in my living room demanding money and daring to invoke their mother’s wishes. “You took the ring off her hand,” I said quietly, “while she lay in her coffin. And now you want to lecture me about what your mother would have wanted.”<\/p>\n
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