The Silver Promise
This is a true story about a silver ring – a relic of Australian currency, then a form of WW2 ‘trench art’, a lost life, a life without love, and two promises.
In the summer of 1989, I was home from college and living with my grandmother, easing through those in-between months where life hasn’t quite decided what it’s going to be yet.
Next door lived two elderly sisters who had spent their entire adult lives in that house. Their names were Josephine Hoskiewicz and Anna Hoskiewicz, and they had never married, choosing instead a quiet, shared life that had settled into the neighborhood so completely that it felt like they had always been there and always would be. Anna was more reserved, the kind of presence you noticed over time rather than all at once, but Josephine - Jo - had a different energy to her. She was affable, quick to laugh, and carried a kind of mischief that didn’t quite match her age. She was the fun old lady - an avid Catholic who would bend rules if it seemed innocent enough.
She drove an early 1970s blue Nova, a car that had been reduced over the years to short, careful trips to the grocery store and church, literally never more than a half-mile at a time, the engine rarely rising above a gentle idle. It had settled into that life the way she had, quietly and without complaint. But once we got to know each other, she would sometimes ask me to take her out on the interstate so we could “blow it out,” as she called it, clearing the carbon from years of restraint. I was a car guy back then, so opening up a pre-emission V8 was its own kind of joy.
We would get up to speed, heading north on I-91, the engine waking in a way it hadn’t for years, and she would laugh - not politely, but fully - and if we pushed toward 100 miles per hour, black smoke trailing behind us, she would call out, “Go, go, go!” with the kind of joy that made you forget, for a moment, how long she had been living carefully.
That was Jo.
One day that summer, she asked me to come over and sit down with her. There was nothing dramatic about it, no long preamble, just a quiet request that carried a little more weight than usual. She was her same bright self, but this time more focused, more reflective.
She told me that during World War II, she had served as a Lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps, one of many young women sent into the Pacific theater, where the war unfolded in jungles and on islands most Americans had never heard of before it began. Places like New Guinea and the surrounding regions saw fierce fighting, and the wounded were often transported to field hospitals in Australia or nearby bases, where nurses like Jo worked under conditions that were difficult to describe and even harder to forget.
She said there was a reason she had never married or had children.
She told me she had fallen in love once - with just one man - and try as she might, she could never match that feeling with anyone else. As she spoke, she leaned in slightly, her eyes beginning to redden and glisten with restrained emotion.
That love she felt, was with an American soldier who had been brought into her care, badly injured, the kind of injury that even in that time and place carried a quiet understanding that survival was uncertain. She told me his name, and I lost it - the way young people sometimes lose things they don’t yet understand they should hold onto. In the 1980s, it was not unusual to hear stories from World War II. Veterans from that time were still part of everyday life. But until that day, I honestly had no idea she had been one of them.
They fell in love there, in that strange, suspended world where time does not move the way it does anywhere else, where days feel both rushed and endless, and where people can become deeply connected in ways that would take years under ordinary circumstances.
At some point, it became clear that he was not going to survive. In her words,she said it was difficult to experience, after both developing strong feelings for one another. She would preface these explanations with repeated lines such as “oh, he was just so wonderful”, or, “he was so kind”, or “he was such a handsome devil”. The ‘story’ I’m sharing with you here was much more animated than it might seem in writing.
She told me that he had given her a ring as a profession of his feelings for her. He wished he had more time, she said - that things could be different.
And she removed it from her finger, and in similar fashion to the Titanic, clutched it for a moment with her eyes closed, and then placed it in my hand.
He had made it himself, she said - as I inspected it, from a coin he had received somewhere along his journey. I later learned on my own, that during long stretches of travel in WW2 - on transport ships crossing the Pacific, or in moments between movements - soldiers would take what little they had and shape it into something else, something to occupy their hands and minds, something that might outlast the uncertainty surrounding them. Today, it is called trench art. The coin had originally been an Australian florin, silver, something ordinary and functional, passed from hand to hand in a country suddenly pulled into a global war.
Because it was mostly pure silver and amiable/moldable, he had worked it down into a ring.
It is not difficult to imagine him doing it, though the details are lost. A young man so very far from home, carrying worry and fear in a way that had become common for his generation, shaping a piece of metal into something he could hold, something he might give, without knowing where he would end up or who he would meet. Perhaps he imagined giving it to someone back home - a mother, a father - or perhaps he simply needed something to do with his hands.
And somehow, that small act - done in a moment of uncertainty - became the most meaningful object in both of their lives. That may sound like a dramatic line, but there is no simpler way to say it. As she played the story out to me, you hear her joy, see her delight in memories from so long ago. As well as the sorrow that always followed.
He gave it to her before he died.
That small, former coin - whatever its monetary value once was - became the only material thing he had to give, and therefore the most valuable, to both of them. The improbability of it all is difficult to ignore.
She told me that losing him changed the course of her life in a way she could never undo. She tried, she said, to move forward, to build something else, but nothing ever came close. Whatever it was about that man became a measure that could not be met again.
And so she stayed. With her sister Anna, in that house, living a full life by any outward measure, but one shaped quietly by a moment that never really left her.
Anna passed away the following year, in 1990, as expected. Jo lived a few years longer, passing in 1993 at the age of 82. She had brothers, but no children, and for reasons I cannot fully explain, she chose me - a 19-year-old kid next door who liked to drive her car too fast - to carry something that had meant everything to her.
She looked at me and said, “Mike, I am the end of the line in my family. I have no one to give my things to. And this ring means the most.”
Then she added, in a way that felt both casual and deeply intentional, “You can put it in a box if you want, but I’d like for you to wear it on your finger like I have my entire life. It’s brought me good luck, and I think it will you too.”
There was nothing ceremonial about it. It was not meant to be preserved or displayed.
It was simply meant to continue.
I put it on my finger then and there. It fit as if it had been made for it.
I told her I would wear it for the rest of my life.
And I have.
For nearly forty years now - through college, parenthood, travel, a career and a few partners who felt insecure about. Otherwise, no one notices it, despite it being in nearly every photograph I am in. At arm’s length, the story of the ring has everything - innocence, love, war, loss. It is sweet, tragic, melancholic, and, in its own way, complete.
But, perhaps it is more than that.
What Becomes of Things
It is easy, looking at a ring like this, to call it special, but that word does not carry much weight once you look closely at what it really is. It is rare in one sense - trench art can easily be found, bought, and sold - but this one carries a story. You can almost feel the handling of it across time.
It is silver. Worn and reshaped. Not particularly beautiful by most standards. It is not something that would stand out in a display case, nor something a person would choose for its appearance alone.
It does not announce itself.
But one day, it will not be noticed at all.
When I am gone, someone will go through what I leave behind. They will sort through photographs, objects, pieces of a life that made sense to me but may not to them. They may see that this ring appears again and again, always on my hand, and they may wonder about it for a moment, or they may not.
It will go into a box.
And at some point, it will become what it was before any of this.
Just metal.
There is a kind of sadness in that, if you stop there.
But I don’t think that is where the story ends.
A Longer View
Before it was a ring, it was a coin. Before that, it was silver taken from the earth. Before that, it was part of processes so distant in time and scale that they are difficult to hold in the mind.
At some point, it became part of an economy, moving through hands in Australia, exchanged for things both small and necessary. It may have bought a meal, or a drink, or something meant to comfort someone in a difficult time. It was part of lives we will never know. Each person who held it could not have imagined what it would become, or how much value it would carry for two people in one brief moment that was not just an exchange, but a commitment to promise.
Or that it would continue on with someone like me - photographed, written about, and thought of by people who will never touch it.
It was just a coin.
Then the world shifted, and war pulled people across oceans.
A young American found himself far from home, carrying that coin among whatever else he had. He worked it into a ring, not knowing what it would become, only that he was doing something with his hands in a time when everything else was out of his control.
He met Josephine Hoskiewicz.
They fell in love in a place where love was not expected to occur, much less last, and perhaps because of that, it took on a weight that neither of them would have chosen but both of them carried.
He gave her the ring.
She wore it for the rest of her life.
And through a series of events that are no less improbable than any other, it came to me.
What I Think It Means to Matter
There is a tendency to think that things matter only if they last, that meaning must be preserved in order to count.
But that does not seem to be how the world works.
This ring will not always carry this story. There will come a time when no one knows where it came from, who made it, or why it was ever worn.
It will return, in a sense, to what it always was.
And yet none of that removes what has already happened.
A man made it.
A woman loved him.
A life was shaped by that loss.
And for a time, that meaning has continued, carried forward not by design, but by circumstance.
A Small Thing in a Large Universe
At the same time that this small piece of silver has been moving through hands and lives, events of unimaginable scale have been unfolding in the universe - stars forming and collapsing, collisions sending waves across space that we are only now beginning to detect.
Set against that, this ring is nothing. And yet, within the narrow band of human experience, it has been something. It has been present for moments that mattered deeply to the people who lived them. It has been carried, worn, and passed along, not because it was valuable in itself, but because of what it came to represent in a particular place and time. That does not need to last forever to be real.
Its existence has played a role - however small - in the participation of human experience in a way that is difficult to measure, but impossible to deny.
What I Think This Suggests
If you step back far enough, this is all just matter moving through time.
Silver atoms formed long before any of this, shaped by forces that had nothing to do with war, love, or loss. Silver (and gold) is created when two neutron stars collide with one another. Those atoms found their way into the earth, were pulled out, minted into a coin, passed through hands, carried across an ocean, reshaped by a young man who did not know how little time he had, and given to a woman who would carry that moment with her for the rest of her life.
None of that was planned. There is no obvious reason why that particular chain of events had to occur the way it did, or why it continued at all. And yet it did. The ring is not important because it lasts, and it is not important because it was ever valuable.
It is important because, for a brief stretch of time, it sat at the intersection of human experience - love, fear, hope, loss - and carried that forward simply by continuing to exist. Eventually, it will return to what it always was. The story will fall away. The meaning will dissolve. The recognition will be gone.
But the fact that it ever happened at all remains.
That a small piece of matter, in a universe governed by probability and decay, could find itself present for something that mattered so deeply to the people who experienced it - and then continue on, passing through another life, and another - that is the part that is the most difficult to ignore. Not because it lasts. But because it occurred.
The Only Honest Ending
One day, this ring will be just silver again. No story attached to it. No memory held within it. No recognition of what it once was. But that does not undo anything.
It does not undo the man who made it, or the life he did not get to live.
It does not undo the love Josephine carried with her for the rest of her life.
It does not undo the strange and unlikely path that brought it into my hand.
Most things pass through the world unnoticed. This did not. And for a little while longer, it still hasn’t.
This is a true story about a silver ring – a relic of Australian currency, then a form of WW2 ‘trench art’, a lost life, a life without love, and two promises.
In the summer of 1989, I was home from college and living with my grandmother, easing through those in-between months where life hasn’t quite decided what it’s going to be yet.
Next door lived two elderly sisters who had spent their entire adult lives in that house. Their names were Josephine Hoskiewicz and Anna Hoskiewicz, and they had never married, choosing instead a quiet, shared life that had settled into the neighborhood so completely that it felt like they had always been there and always would be. Anna was more reserved, the kind of presence you noticed over time rather than all at once, but Josephine - Jo - had a different energy to her. She was affable, quick to laugh, and carried a kind of mischief that didn’t quite match her age. She was the fun old lady - an avid Catholic who would bend rules if it seemed innocent enough.
She drove an early 1970s blue Nova, a car that had been reduced over the years to short, careful trips to the grocery store and church, literally never more than a half-mile at a time, the engine rarely rising above a gentle idle. It had settled into that life the way she had, quietly and without complaint. But once we got to know each other, she would sometimes ask me to take her out on the interstate so we could “blow it out,” as she called it, clearing the carbon from years of restraint. I was a car guy back then, so opening up a pre-emission V8 was its own kind of joy.
We would get up to speed, heading north on I-91, the engine waking in a way it hadn’t for years, and she would laugh - not politely, but fully - and if we pushed toward 100 miles per hour, black smoke trailing behind us, she would call out, “Go, go, go!” with the kind of joy that made you forget, for a moment, how long she had been living carefully.
That was Jo.
One day that summer, she asked me to come over and sit down with her. There was nothing dramatic about it, no long preamble, just a quiet request that carried a little more weight than usual. She was her same bright self, but this time more focused, more reflective.
She told me that during World War II, she had served as a Lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps, one of many young women sent into the Pacific theater, where the war unfolded in jungles and on islands most Americans had never heard of before it began. Places like New Guinea and the surrounding regions saw fierce fighting, and the wounded were often transported to field hospitals in Australia or nearby bases, where nurses like Jo worked under conditions that were difficult to describe and even harder to forget.
She said there was a reason she had never married or had children.
She told me she had fallen in love once - with just one man - and try as she might, she could never match that feeling with anyone else. As she spoke, she leaned in slightly, her eyes beginning to redden and glisten with restrained emotion.
That love she felt, was with an American soldier who had been brought into her care, badly injured, the kind of injury that even in that time and place carried a quiet understanding that survival was uncertain. She told me his name, and I lost it - the way young people sometimes lose things they don’t yet understand they should hold onto. In the 1980s, it was not unusual to hear stories from World War II. Veterans from that time were still part of everyday life. But until that day, I honestly had no idea she had been one of them.
They fell in love there, in that strange, suspended world where time does not move the way it does anywhere else, where days feel both rushed and endless, and where people can become deeply connected in ways that would take years under ordinary circumstances.
At some point, it became clear that he was not going to survive. In her words,she said it was difficult to experience, after both developing strong feelings for one another. She would preface these explanations with repeated lines such as “oh, he was just so wonderful”, or, “he was so kind”, or “he was such a handsome devil”. The ‘story’ I’m sharing with you here was much more animated than it might seem in writing.
She told me that he had given her a ring as a profession of his feelings for her. He wished he had more time, she said - that things could be different.
And she removed it from her finger, and in similar fashion to the Titanic, clutched it for a moment with her eyes closed, and then placed it in my hand.
He had made it himself, she said - as I inspected it, from a coin he had received somewhere along his journey. I later learned on my own, that during long stretches of travel in WW2 - on transport ships crossing the Pacific, or in moments between movements - soldiers would take what little they had and shape it into something else, something to occupy their hands and minds, something that might outlast the uncertainty surrounding them. Today, it is called trench art. The coin had originally been an Australian florin, silver, something ordinary and functional, passed from hand to hand in a country suddenly pulled into a global war.
Because it was mostly pure silver and amiable/moldable, he had worked it down into a ring.
It is not difficult to imagine him doing it, though the details are lost. A young man so very far from home, carrying worry and fear in a way that had become common for his generation, shaping a piece of metal into something he could hold, something he might give, without knowing where he would end up or who he would meet. Perhaps he imagined giving it to someone back home - a mother, a father - or perhaps he simply needed something to do with his hands.
And somehow, that small act - done in a moment of uncertainty - became the most meaningful object in both of their lives. That may sound like a dramatic line, but there is no simpler way to say it. As she played the story out to me, you hear her joy, see her delight in memories from so long ago. As well as the sorrow that always followed.
He gave it to her before he died.
That small, former coin - whatever its monetary value once was - became the only material thing he had to give, and therefore the most valuable, to both of them. The improbability of it all is difficult to ignore.
She told me that losing him changed the course of her life in a way she could never undo. She tried, she said, to move forward, to build something else, but nothing ever came close. Whatever it was about that man became a measure that could not be met again.
And so she stayed. With her sister Anna, in that house, living a full life by any outward measure, but one shaped quietly by a moment that never really left her.
Anna passed away the following year, in 1990, as expected. Jo lived a few years longer, passing in 1993 at the age of 82. She had brothers, but no children, and for reasons I cannot fully explain, she chose me - a 19-year-old kid next door who liked to drive her car too fast - to carry something that had meant everything to her.
She looked at me and said, “Mike, I am the end of the line in my family. I have no one to give my things to. And this ring means the most.”
Then she added, in a way that felt both casual and deeply intentional, “You can put it in a box if you want, but I’d like for you to wear it on your finger like I have my entire life. It’s brought me good luck, and I think it will you too.”
There was nothing ceremonial about it. It was not meant to be preserved or displayed.
It was simply meant to continue.
I put it on my finger then and there. It fit as if it had been made for it.
I told her I would wear it for the rest of my life.
And I have.
For nearly forty years now - through college, parenthood, travel, a career and a few partners who felt insecure about. Otherwise, no one notices it, despite it being in nearly every photograph I am in. At arm’s length, the story of the ring has everything - innocence, love, war, loss. It is sweet, tragic, melancholic, and, in its own way, complete.
But, perhaps it is more than that.
What Becomes of Things
It is easy, looking at a ring like this, to call it special, but that word does not carry much weight once you look closely at what it really is. It is rare in one sense - trench art can easily be found, bought, and sold - but this one carries a story. You can almost feel the handling of it across time.
It is silver. Worn and reshaped. Not particularly beautiful by most standards. It is not something that would stand out in a display case, nor something a person would choose for its appearance alone.
It does not announce itself.
But one day, it will not be noticed at all.
When I am gone, someone will go through what I leave behind. They will sort through photographs, objects, pieces of a life that made sense to me but may not to them. They may see that this ring appears again and again, always on my hand, and they may wonder about it for a moment, or they may not.
It will go into a box.
And at some point, it will become what it was before any of this.
Just metal.
There is a kind of sadness in that, if you stop there.
But I don’t think that is where the story ends.
A Longer View
Before it was a ring, it was a coin. Before that, it was silver taken from the earth. Before that, it was part of processes so distant in time and scale that they are difficult to hold in the mind.
At some point, it became part of an economy, moving through hands in Australia, exchanged for things both small and necessary. It may have bought a meal, or a drink, or something meant to comfort someone in a difficult time. It was part of lives we will never know. Each person who held it could not have imagined what it would become, or how much value it would carry for two people in one brief moment that was not just an exchange, but a commitment to promise.
Or that it would continue on with someone like me - photographed, written about, and thought of by people who will never touch it.
It was just a coin.
Then the world shifted, and war pulled people across oceans.
A young American found himself far from home, carrying that coin among whatever else he had. He worked it into a ring, not knowing what it would become, only that he was doing something with his hands in a time when everything else was out of his control.
He met Josephine Hoskiewicz.
They fell in love in a place where love was not expected to occur, much less last, and perhaps because of that, it took on a weight that neither of them would have chosen but both of them carried.
He gave her the ring.
She wore it for the rest of her life.
And through a series of events that are no less improbable than any other, it came to me.
What I Think It Means to Matter
There is a tendency to think that things matter only if they last, that meaning must be preserved in order to count.
But that does not seem to be how the world works.
This ring will not always carry this story. There will come a time when no one knows where it came from, who made it, or why it was ever worn.
It will return, in a sense, to what it always was.
And yet none of that removes what has already happened.
A man made it.
A woman loved him.
A life was shaped by that loss.
And for a time, that meaning has continued, carried forward not by design, but by circumstance.
A Small Thing in a Large Universe
At the same time that this small piece of silver has been moving through hands and lives, events of unimaginable scale have been unfolding in the universe - stars forming and collapsing, collisions sending waves across space that we are only now beginning to detect.
Set against that, this ring is nothing. And yet, within the narrow band of human experience, it has been something. It has been present for moments that mattered deeply to the people who lived them. It has been carried, worn, and passed along, not because it was valuable in itself, but because of what it came to represent in a particular place and time. That does not need to last forever to be real.
Its existence has played a role - however small - in the participation of human experience in a way that is difficult to measure, but impossible to deny.
What I Think This Suggests
If you step back far enough, this is all just matter moving through time.
Silver atoms formed long before any of this, shaped by forces that had nothing to do with war, love, or loss. Silver (and gold) is created when two neutron stars collide with one another. Those atoms found their way into the earth, were pulled out, minted into a coin, passed through hands, carried across an ocean, reshaped by a young man who did not know how little time he had, and given to a woman who would carry that moment with her for the rest of her life.
None of that was planned. There is no obvious reason why that particular chain of events had to occur the way it did, or why it continued at all. And yet it did. The ring is not important because it lasts, and it is not important because it was ever valuable.
It is important because, for a brief stretch of time, it sat at the intersection of human experience - love, fear, hope, loss - and carried that forward simply by continuing to exist. Eventually, it will return to what it always was. The story will fall away. The meaning will dissolve. The recognition will be gone.
But the fact that it ever happened at all remains.
That a small piece of matter, in a universe governed by probability and decay, could find itself present for something that mattered so deeply to the people who experienced it - and then continue on, passing through another life, and another - that is the part that is the most difficult to ignore. Not because it lasts. But because it occurred.
The Only Honest Ending
One day, this ring will be just silver again. No story attached to it. No memory held within it. No recognition of what it once was. But that does not undo anything.
It does not undo the man who made it, or the life he did not get to live.
It does not undo the love Josephine carried with her for the rest of her life.
It does not undo the strange and unlikely path that brought it into my hand.
Most things pass through the world unnoticed. This did not. And for a little while longer, it still hasn’t.
