An Illinois woman never imagined she would be able to replace her wedding and engagement rings after she lost them at the nursing home where she lives with her husband, but that’s exactly what happened.
Days before Pat Johnson’s 67th wedding anniversary to her husband, Don Johnson, 88, he gave her a new diamond ring for Christmas.
Don Johnson’s daughter, Diane Hawkins, helped him shop for a new wedding band for her mother — an admittedly difficult task considering that the couple is “inseparable,” Hawkins told ABC News.
To make it possible, Hawkins’ brother stayed with their mother while they went shopping. Hawkins told her mother that she was taking their father to an appointment, rather than on a trip to find the perfect gift.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the room” when he presented the ring, Hawkins wrote in a YouTube post of the video. She explained that her mother had recently fallen and injured her left hand, causing it to swell up.
Unable to wear her rings on the injured hand, Pat Johnson, 85, placed them in a jewelry box on a dresser in her room at the nursing home. They went missing shortly afterward, according to Hawkins.
When Don Johnson presented his wife with the box, she joked as she unwrapped the gift.
“I don’t think this was got in the dollar store; they don’t wrap up like this,” she said in the video, surrounded by family, including six of their seven children.
It took Pat Johnson a while to open the box, but when she finally saw what it contained, she was speechless.
Hawkins called her parents “good, gracious and inspiring people.”
“They’re always holding hands,” she said. “People always comment about that.”
