As I continue to literally sit out this pandemic on my couch, I spend more hours scrolling through Instagram than I’m going to admit. It used to be just photographers and African models. Then, I expanded my interests to jewelry, and now to antique jewelry specifically.

I used to be interested in antique jewelry but then I felt I had enough and forgot about it as a category of desire. I was content to wear two rings, my grandma’s and my wedding ring. I have a nice collection of Victorian tiger claw jewelry, which I have bitched about here. But Instagram triggered my lizard brain propensity to hunt-and gather. I wanted more jewelry. I needed more jewelry.

I discovered a whole bunch of antique jewelry vendors who showcased the stuff they sold on Etsy or Ruby Lane. Then I discovered vendors who only sold their pieces on Instagram, which meant a hectic competition to DM your interest. All these people called their rings “she.” This is sickening, obviously, but not enough to put me off my new obsession.

I realized that these people, mostly women, formed a community and knew each other by their first names. So a compliment from Something Something Jewels brought a reply of “Thank you Judy!” or in the case of a ring, “Yes, isn’t she a nice one?”

Then I found the worst kind of Instagram Jewelry Woman in existence: The collector (i.e., hoarder) who is just there to show off her stuff, which tends toward the dazzling and shockingly expensive. They will photograph their hands festooned with fifty thousand rings, captioning them with casual descriptions like “Saturday stack” or “Can you guess which ones are new?”

One of these collectors posted a literal stack of gold rings, a type I personally love, and remarked giddily, “I just can’t stop buying —–rings!” I restrained my self from commenting, “TRY!” I asked a friend to leave that comment but she has the same reluctance to identify herself as an asshole, and refused.

I came across a woman whose passion is mourning jewelry. She is quite scholarly about it, and has written a book on the subject. She sells the occasional piece but is mostly there to educate. Her account led me to a person who collects and sells mourning jewelry, who captioned one photo with “Love me some sad ladies and urns!” Ew, I thought. I looked at her jewelry with a mixture of envy and irritation. You can go look yourself at @yulianaeternalmourning.

I began to ponder the attraction of mourning jewelry. Victorian regalia is so romantic, let’s face it. And mourning was part of Victorian life

The average lifespan during the Victorian era was 40 to 45 years. Europe was in a near constant state of war, and cholera, typhoid, smallpox, and scarlet fever were common killers. Approximately one in three children died before the age of five, and epidemics sometimes brought that number to one in two.

Simply put, death was a constant companion in the Victorian era. Mourning jewelry brought a little solace to the survivors who had to cope with frequent losses.*

Without thinking about any of this, years ago I put some of Max’s hair into an old gold locket, and I wear it wherever I go, just to keep him with me. It was and remains “a little solace.” I’ve actually become superstitious about it…a whole other story.

So I began to feel upset about the procuring and flaunting of mourning jewelry. Yuliana was the worst of the worst, I felt. I looked at her stacked fingers and read her smug captions and decided to comment.

Naturally, she blocked me! I wish I could remember my exact comment, which was actually a stern lecture. It was something like, “Do you realize that each ring is a token of someone’s grief and loss?? Do you think the owners of those rings ever imagined that they would adorn the fingers of a stranger showing off on Istagram? I wear a piece of my son’s hair in a locket, and I’ll be damned if it ends up with a bunch of other lockets around the neck of a gloating stranger.

Oops, I pissed her off. Nobody likes a sore loser, I guess. Nobody likes real mourning, or real pain and bitterness. But when people are awful, I have to let them know. It’s my calling. That and hideous denim.