The Kindness of Strangers Reunited Me with a Treasured Heirloom (Exclusive)

When 'Five' author Ilona Bannister lost a necklace belonging to her late grandmother, she was inconsolable.

When I was six my grandmother, Marika, taught me how to swim. The summer sky was cloudless and blue, the pool was bright blue and as she held me on my back in the water, I focused on the enamel medallion that glittered around her neck in the sun. She always wore it. A tiny Ukrainian icon of Mary, her tired mother’s eyes looking at me, her royal blue mantle draped about her exhausted holy shoulders. When I was 16, Marika died and I inherited the necklace. When I was 33, I had my first child and I put it on and never took it off so I could feel Marika protecting us. Then when I was 47, I lost it in the back of an Uber and it was like losing her all over again.

I was dropping my son off at his friend’s house when I noticed it was missing. I checked my clothes, my shoes, my bag, my pockets, I frantically shook out my sweater, my belt, my son, anywhere it could have clung to. It was gone. The Uber was gone too but I ran back to our drop-off point across the street to check the sidewalk, the gutter, the drifts of fallen leaves. Nothing. I tried not to panic. I retraced my steps. I went back to the house of a friend where the car had picked us up, and I checked her hallway, her kitchen, her dog. I looked under parked cars, more fallen leaves, but found nothing. 

Devastated, I picked up my son two hours later and we took another Uber to the station to take our train out of the city, back to our town, an hour away. I had already tried to call the driver and tapped all the icons in the app to report a lost item, but the form did not allow me to explain that my grandmother was a woman of faith who ordered holy water from Lourdes that she got in the mail and kept in the fridge to bless us in case of emergencies. That when I was 8, she showed me where she kept the vial of earth she had taken with her from Ukraine when she left during World War II, instructing me to make sure she was buried in the soil of her homeland when the day came. That her funeral outfit was hanging in the closet, a black skirt and vest with a traditionally embroidered blouse, her vyshyvanka, ready for her coffin a decade before her death. 

That this necklace was not just a necklace, it was the portal through which she could reach me from the other side, 30 years after I lost her, because that was the depth of her belief. All I could do was share my phone number and check “jewelery” on the app’s lost item form and hope he could feel the meaning under the word when he got the message. 

Our train pulled away from the city and I was bereft. Even if the driver contacted me now, how many passengers had been in and out of the backseat in that time? The necklace, so tiny and delicate, could be anywhere, with anyone, and even if it was found, it would have to be dropped off with a friend, adding layers of logistical complexity. But of all the lessons my grandmother taught me, from swimming to funeral planning to love of her homeland, I had forgotten about her faith that when we lose the people we love, they continue to look out for us. I had forgotten about her belief in the kindness of strangers, in holding onto hope, in patience, the things that had helped her survive war and migration and life far from home. 

And then I got the text. The driver: “I find it.” My son and I cheered in the silent train car. I texted back a tearful paragraph about my grandmother, what it meant, how grateful I was, how sorry I was to have to ask him to drive it back to my friend’s house. He texted back in halting English, “Ok ok no problem,”  the same kind my grandmother spoke with a different accent long ago.

Then he took the time to drive it back to my waiting friend for safekeeping even though he was far from her house, even though the app limited the amount I could give him to say thank you. Even though I could have never given him enough in exchange for what he gave back to me. 

Maybe I was just one of hundreds of people he met in his car, one of many stories he had just like mine. Maybe he was just a nice guy doing what nice guys do. Or maybe he too had a grandmother once who had wrapped him in love, taught him to swim and to be kind, who was watching over him now, like mine was, over me.

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Ilona Bannister's Five is out May 5 and available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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