Woman finds wedding rings five years later

You know that sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you lose something you treasure, something irreplaceable? It never really goes away, unless by some miracle you find the item.

Kathleen Schaecher gives us all hope. She recently found her wedding ring and her husband's wedding band after losing them five years ago.

"I never, ever dreamed I would see my rings again," the 84-year-old Salem woman said. "It's hard for me to believe. I'm still shocked."

She found them in the bottom of the 16-cubic-foot Kenmore chest freezer in her garage. And all this time, she thought she'd lost them at Costco.

"I'm glad I found them," she said, "because I hated going to Costco."

She lost the rings Nov. 2, 2003. It was a Sunday, a day Schaecher will never forget.

She had just been to Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church and was shopping at Costco with her daughter-in-law. She remembers putting a ham in the cart, maybe even hearing a tinkling sound at one point and later discovering her rings were gone. She wore them together on her left ring finger, as she had since her husband died in 1998. The rings had been resized but still were loose on her finger.

Schaecher frantically retraced her steps in the warehouse and in the parking lot. Costco employees joined the search. She went home empty-handed and heartbroken, leaving her name and number in hopes that someone would find the rings and turn them in. But Schaecher just knew they were gone forever.

"It was a most horrible feeling," she said. "I was devastated."

The years passed, and Schaecher often thought about her rings and where they disappeared to. Now and then, her hopes of finding them were renewed, once after reading about a woman who accidentally tossed her wedding ring in the garbage but was able to find it at the dump. How lucky that woman was, Schaecher thought.

The rings weren't insured because they really weren't that valuable. His was a simple gold band. Hers was a modest solitaire diamond set in gold.

"It's tiny, but it's a good little diamond," she said, repeating what a jeweler once told her.

The four Cs (carat, clarity, color and cut) have never been important to Schaecher. The true value of their wedding rings was what they symbolized. The love she and her husband shared for 53 years. Their courtship and wedding in London, during World War II.Continued...

"How sweet is their love story. The value of a something is not measured on its price.It is the memory and the reason it was bought and used."