My Most Cherished Thing

When my mother died in February 2001, she left my father and my brother and I. My brother is two and one half years younger than I am. He lives alone, has never been married and has no children. My parent had a very cute cape cod style house just outside the city limits in the same city they were both born and raised in. They were both the youngest in a family of 9 in each family. They were both of Italian descendants. My father's father came here from Italy following some of his relatives and my mother's father came here from Italy to work in a steel mill in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Around the time my father asked my mother to marry him back in 1951 he had just won $500 in something called the Sweepstakes. An older version, from what I know, of today's lottery. I am not sure but I don't know whether it was legal or no. So my father said to his brother, "well I think I should buy ny girlfriend a diamond with this money and ask her to marry me." So that's what he did. and they were married for just two months shy of their 50th anniversary before she died.
So as I was going through her things after she died I opened her jewelry box and started trying to figure what to do with her things some was costume jewelry and some was expensive pieces. I took her engagement ring out and said to my father, "what do you want me to do with her ring?" He said, "you will wear it, of course." I was so thrilled. There had never been any mention of how this ring would be passed down and to whom. About the 25th year of their marriage my brother had given my mother a pair of diamond earrings, just little studs. At that time she took the ring and had the original diamond and the pair of diamond earrings that my brother gave her and had them put, all three stones, into one setting. It was a rather large ring then so she didn't wear her wedding band with it. My father also gave me her wedding band and I had my jeweler re work it into a heart shape and he hung a stone made from her birthstone in the center. I have that on a gold chain that I wear occasionally. I wear her diamond ring all the time. As a matter of fact I retired my wedding band and engagement ring that my husband gave me and I wear my mother's in their place. I took it to the my jeweler when my father gave it to me and had it appraised and cleaned and sized to fit me. Within hours of me leaving it with him he called me very excited. He said, "that ring you left with me, I have to tell you something." Oh my God, I thought, my mother must have been wearing a fake diamond all these years." So he said, "it is an absolute perfect one carat diamond, no flaws and worth a lot more than the $500 your father paid for it 50 years ago. Oh my God I thought, I will be a nervous wreck wearing it. My mother wore it everyday for 50 years and never really new how much it was worth. I took it to my jeweler this week to have the prongs checked. Some of the prongs were weakening so I left with him to put it on a new head. When I stopped to pick it up he had some bad news to tell me, the stone had a slight chip in it. Nothing I could see with the naked eye, but he could see it with his magnifying glass. He said it doesn't change the value. He is going to hide the chip with a prong and see how it holds up. If it starts to fail he will take it out and re cut and smooth the area and it should be fine and the crack will not get worse. I must have banged it somehow. He said, "your mother must not have worn this everyday." I said, "yes she did." I felt really terrible. How could this happen.