‘I bet I cried for at least a good month.’

‘I thought I was a dead man.’ 

Readers recount their panic after losing their wedding or engagment rings.

Rose Collins lost her engagement ring 58 years ago.

After being married for two weeks. After dropping it down a flushing toilet.

She’s still not over it.

Jon Fortin lost his wedding band when he jumped out of a pile of leaves on Halloween night to prank his nephew.

Every story is different, but when it comes to losing a wedding or engagement ring, they all start the same — with a moment of heart-stopping panic.

No one knows exactly how many people lose their ring each year, but a 2014 RingSafe survey suggests 40 percent of men — or about 20 million married guys in America — have lost their wedding band at least once. No word on whether women hang on to their rings any better.

Readers — both men and women — recently shared their heartbreak, relief-filled-joy (it can happen!) and tips for making sure your ring doesn’t disappear. (Hint: If your band is loose, don’t go waving your hands around. Just . . . don’t.)

Revenge of the Halloween prank

On Halloween night more than two months ago, Jon Fortin hid beneath the fallen leaves and waited for his young nephew to pass.

Just as the boy walked by to get candy from the house on School Street in Lewiston, Fortin jumped up, flung his hands in the air and —

“My wedding band went flying into the big pile of leaves,” he said. 

Cue panic.

“I’m a big prankster, so when at first I told my brother it happened, he didn’t believe me. Then I started looking for the ring and he jumped in and started looking,” Fortin said. “It got to the point where it was my brother and I and probably a good six to eight other people with flashlights and flashlights on their cellphones looking for the ring. There were people without gloves just digging through the leaves, which were wet.” 

Fortin and his wife, devout Christians, had just celebrated their 10th anniversary three days earlier. There’s never a good time to lose a wedding band, but this was particularly distressing.

For an hour and a half, Fortin and company — including a group of kind-hearted passersby — scoured the ground for the silver band. Fortin eventually gave up pawing through the leaves and retrieved a metal detector from his home.

Finally, luckily, he found it. 

Fortin was relieved — and grateful.

“I just wanted to tell the people who were looking for the ring that it was greatly appreciated,” he said.

It wasn’t the first time Fortin, of Lisbon, had lost — and found — his wedding ring. It’s happened twice at work, where he handles freight.

It doesn’t help that the band is loose.

“I’ve been meaning to get it sized for quite a while now,” he said. “After Halloween night, it’s going to happen in the next couple of weeks.”

Despite the turmoil the ring has caused, he’s never considered not wearing it.

“No, no, no, no, no. No. I mean, we placed rings on our fingers 10 years ago and we said our vows,” he said. “Those rings are not coming off.”

Gone but not forgotten

In 1958, 19-year-old Rose Collins married Gene, a 21-year-old Navy man. They’d met a couple of years before, a happy accident involving a friend-of-a-friend and an impromptu stop at a little diner.

Two weeks after they said “I do,” he was back on his ship and she was cleaning the bathroom in the Rhode Island apartment they would share. She took off her engagement ring to wash up — when it slipped from her hand and into the toilet she’d just flushed.

Her custom-made white gold solitaire was gone.

“I was so devastated,” she said. “And to be a newlywed and my husband was gone. I said, ‘Oh, what am I going to do?'”

Collins’ father searched the plumbing in the old apartment, but he couldn’t find the ring. She told her husband of two weeks what happened. 

“He was just as upset as I was,” she said. 

Collins’ aunt bought her a new ring, but it wasn’t the same.

“It got taken care of in one way, but in another way it’ll never be the same,” she said.

The lost engagement ring did not prove to be a jinx. The couple went on to have two kids and spend more than 40 years in Maine, most of them in Topsham. Now 77 and 79, they’ve been married nearly 60 years and are great grandparents. 

Still, she thinks of that ring.

“I’ve thought about trying to contact someone, but then I thought, what’s the miracle chance that anyone would find it?” she said. “But then I thought, maybe someone did some major plumbing at some point.”

Nearly 60 years later, she can’t help but hold out hope.

“I always thought some miracle might happen and the ring would show up,” she said.

Lost to the deep

Lindsey Atwood thought about taking off her interlocking engagement and wedding rings before she went in the water at Reid State Park with her preschool students and co-workers last summer. But she didn’t.

“It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine,” she thought.

Then she rode a wave to the shore and put her hand down in the shallow water to push herself up.   

“I can still feel it slipping off my finger. It kind of dangled on the tip of my finger for a second and then it was gone,” she said. “I panicked immediately.”

The preschool teacher from Lisbon Falls spent the rest of the day frantically searching for her ring. At one point, she called her mom, sobbing.

“She thought something had happened to my daughter from the way I was crying,” she said. “I actually stayed there. My class left. I told my supervisor, ‘Just leave me here. I’ll get my husband to come and get me.’ The thought of leaving there without my ring just killed me.”

Atwood and her husband searched without success. That night, she posted her plight on Facebook. The post was quickly shared over 1,000 times, with some commenters commiserating with her and some offering to help.

“I actually had two people on two different occasions come to Reid State Park with me with metal detectors trying to help me find my ring. They both were very certain they were going to find the ring,” she said. “They thought, ‘We’ll get there on a low tide. We’re sure we’re going to find it, no question about it.”

They didn’t.

“I have not found my ring,” she said. “It was heartbreaking. I bet I cried for at least a good month.”

Although the couple had homeowner’s insurance, they did not have the rider that would have covered the ring’s loss. Atwood bought herself a couple of cheap rings that ended up turning her finger green. This year, she and her husband started making payments on a new ring.

But like Rose Collins, who lost her engagement ring 58 years ago, Atwood isn’t sure she’ll ever get over missing the original.

“I’d hoped someday I would pass that ring down to my daughters. Now I don’t have that,” she said.

But she still has hope.

“For whatever reason I think It’s going to be found after I’m gone. After I pass. And maybe my daughters will get it,” she said. “That’s my hope, that if it’s not found in my lifetime, it’ll be found in my daughters’.”

‘Burst into tears’

Dottie Perham-Whittier was just leaving the Hannaford grocery store in Auburn when she realized her combined engagement ring, wedding band and anniversary band were gone from her finger.

The piece represented more than a promise to love, honor and cherish — it also showed her partner’s devotion. He’d been out of work due to a cardiac disability and had scrimped and saved to buy the diamond, then worked for years more to buy the bands.

Perham-Whittier and a Hannaford cashier frantically searched through the grocery store, but with no luck. Perham-Whittier scoured the parking lot, again turning up nothing. She called her then-husband and mom in tears.

“I really was emotionally distraught because it had such sentimental value,” she said.

Hoping someone might find her ring set, Perham-Whittier left her name with Hannaford and the Auburn Police Department. She called area pawn shops and left a description of the rings.

Then, within two weeks, Perham-Whittier’s marriage suddenly and unexpectedly ended. Even that didn’t stop her from missing her lost rings.

“I still wished I had the wedding set that held so many memories,” she said. “It was a very painful time.” 

A month later, marriage over, rings gone, Perham-Whittier stopped at a local jewelry store. Casually chatting with an employee there, she happened to mention the loss of her rings. The woman asked Perham-Whittier what they looked like.

“Wow, that sounds just like something that came in this morning,” the employee told her. “Would you like to take a look?”

Perham-Whittier did.

“She took the wedding set out of the vault and it was mine! I burst into tears . . . . was a mess, actually,” Perham-Whittier said.

She later learned that a man had found the rings in the Hannaford parking lot and sold them to the jewelry store, telling the people there that he’d broken up with his girlfriend , didn’t need them any more and wanted to sell them.

Today, the ring set lives in a safe, a memory of what was and how God sustained her through sadness, she said.

“Although we divorced in 2014, the set still holds a special place in my heart and I’m very grateful I have it,” she said.

OOB oops

Chris Roy was playing football with his teenage stepson on the beach in Old Orchard Beach when he dove into the water.

He very quickly regretted it.

“When I came back up, I knew I was missing something,” he said.

His wedding band was gone.

The Lewiston man and his family were spending the weekend in Old Orchard Beach. His wife was back at the hotel.

He worried about her reaction when she found out.

“I thought I was a dead man,” he said.

For the next several minutes, Roy and his stepson felt around the ocean floor. They came up empty-handed.

“I talked with her son, who was a high school student at the time, and I kind of like (said), ‘Hey, think I can get a new one before she’ll notice? How do you think we should play this out?'” Roy said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”

Roy returned to the hotel room and told his wife what had happened. She was surprisingly . . . OK with it.

“She was like, ‘Hey that happens, accidents happen, no big deal,'” Roy said. “I was waiting for the anger and the getting yelled at, ‘Why didn’t you take it off?’ She was awesome.”

A couple of days later, Roy’s wife found the website where she’d ordered his original ring and she bought a replacement.

Unfortunately, the relationship was not to be. The couple later divorced.

However, Roy said, “It had nothing to do with the ring whatsoever.”

ltice@sunjournal.com

Advice from those who have been there

* Make sure your ring is sized properly when you order it and periodically thereafter.

* Put your ring in a safe place before starting any tasks or doing any activity that might cause you to lose it.

* If you take your ring off, put it back on as soon as possible.

* Make sure your homeowner’s insurance covers a lost ring.

* When it’s cold outside, wear gloves so the rings won’t slip off your hands, which are slightly smaller when cold.

* Have a “lost ring” conversation with your spouse before a crisis. Sometimes it might make sense to buy a couple of reasonably priced bands — one to wear, one to spare — rather than one very expensive band.

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