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Leonora Leacock

Gary Guadagno had lost hope of ever finding his parents’ wedding rings. His mother had died in 2012 at the age of 84, his father in 1978 at 52. While selling his childhood home in Reading, Pa., in 2011, Guadagno had searched high and low for the rings but never found them.

He figured his mother, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, had thrown them out. He was devastated but didn’t know what else to do other than accept they were lost and move on.

“They’re keepsakes and part of my family legacy,” he told The Washington Post.

Days turned into months, and the months turned into years. A decade passed and still no rings.

Then, in mid-September, Guadagno, 60, got a Facebook message from the woman who’d bought his mother’s house 12 years earlier. Hannah Keuscher told Guadagno that her husband, Josh Martin, had been rooting around inside a light fixture above their kitchen cabinets, trying to find a gift for his wife that he’d squirreled away somewhere. Instead, he discovered a jewelry box. Opening it, he found two rings.

Keuscher, 33, and Martin, 36, suspected they held sentimental value for someone and wanted the rings to be reunited with their owners — or their owners’ family.

Anthony and Rosemarie Guadagno had exchanged the rings when they got married on Sept. 11, 1947. They lived in an apartment until a developer finished building their two-bedroom house on Harvard Boulevard in the early 1950s. There, they raised an only child, Gary, while his father worked as a mechanic and his mother was a stay-at-home parent.

“They were just two very hard-working people and loved each other very much,” Guadagno said.

In 1978, when Gary was 15, Anthony died of a heart attack. Rosemarie started a 20-year career working in the patient transport and supply department of the hospital that had employed her husband as a maintenance mechanic at the time of his death. She retired in 1998 as her Alzheimer’s progressed, and sometime before 2011, stashed the wedding rings up inside her kitchen lights.

Courtesy of Gary Guadagno

Keuscher knew little of that history, but years earlier, she had searched Guadagno’s mother’s name online after seeing it on the home’s bill of sale, which led to her obituary. In September, she found it again, saw Guadagno’s name, located him on Facebook and sent a message on Sept. 19.

Guadagno was shocked that the rings had been found — but also that someone had taken the time to track him down.

“I just sat there for two or three minutes blinking into space,” he said.

Guadagno was ready to drive the roughly 40 miles from his home in Phoenixville, Pa., to his childhood home in Reading. But Keuscher and Martin stepped up again, offering to bring the rings to him.

On Oct. 28, they made good on that offer. The three chatted for a while at Guadagno’s home. Keuscher told Guadagno of an incident that had happened some 16 months after they bought the house and Guadagno had moved his mother into an assisted-living facility. While getting ready for bed, Keuscher saw a bathroom light come on, and then a shadow came into the bedroom. Then, it vanished.

Wondering why her husband had popped in and out so quickly, she called to him. When he didn’t answer, she roved the house, eventually finding him in his basement “man cave.” She asked why he’d darted in and out of the bedroom. He told her he hadn’t been in the bedroom all night.

Hannah’s legs gave out, and she fell to the floor. Fearful, the couple scoured the house but found no one.

As Hannah told her story, Guadagno homed in on the date of Keuscher and Martin’s mysterious visitor: Nov. 23, 2012 — the night his mother died. When she did, her nurse had opened a window at the assisted-nursing facility to let her spirit escape.

“I think she was just coming by to say goodbye to her home,” Keuscher told The Post.

Nearly 11 years later, Guadagno’s mother is saying another hello and goodbye of sorts. Someone finally found her secret stash and rooted out the wedding rings that belonged to her and her late husband. And those mementos are back in the Guadagno family.

“It means the world to me that I have this,” he said.

Keuscher said that neither she nor her husband ever thought of keeping the rings. Having inherited her grandmother’s ring as a young adult, she understood how much sentimental value they might have to someone — or even a whole family.

“They belonged to somebody,” she said. “They had a history.”

Plus, Keuscher remembered the night that Rosemarie died, and she saw a shadow without an owner.

“I felt if I didn’t return these rings,” Keuscher said with a laugh, “she was going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Livingston Award, finalist, 2018

University of California, Berkeley, BA in English

Jonathan Edwards is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. Before joining The Post, he covered public safety for The Virginian-Pilot and Lincoln Journal Star.

Jonathan Edwards

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Pennsylvania man reunited with long-lost parents’ wedding rings

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