Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the stone spins around, a milky rock whose green threading curls like a fishing net falling through water.

If you have seen me this week, it is likely you have glimpsed me at the helm of my grandparents’ gold Cadillac, floating through my hometown at high speeds, windows down, music blaring, the moss agate ring glinting white and blank from my left hand.

Per my grandparents’ generosity, this absurd chariot now shuttles me from life to splintered life: an afternoon with a childhood friend; an evening fighting with my parents; a midday business meeting after which I bemoan my ability to get a job in Southern Sudan, but not in mid-Missouri.

The gold Cadillac waits, trusty and buoyant, ready to ferry me away. The moss agate spins and I trouble it with my fingers. I am not the woman I dreamed I would be when I was a child in this town.

I am thinking of two words as I drive down hometown roads that have never changed, and roads that have gone from gravel to blacktop to spot-lit at night, now marked with orange cones and roaring machines that push tar into the tidy lawns of familiar, beleaguered houses: those words are chastity and grief.

Chastity is a relief, an old friend. I know its wholeness, its loneliness, and the way it rises: less as a gift and more as a natural state of waking, stranded and alone, in a body of appetites and fears.

I remember accepting chastity as an adolescent, as the adults I loved most asked me to do, and fighting it, as my body appealed, until much later I understood it as loneliness kept and soothed into solitude.

It readied me for the loneliness of marriage, which I think is just the loneliness of being human and essentially lost to the love of others and God, except through quieting and settling the self so that it is ready to love.

Grief is kin to all this: grief that I hurt my husband so deeply, so unforgivably, by his heart; grief that I am without children; grief that my parents’ love stands at its own reckoning, so that as their child, I have to decide: if their love dies, do I die?

So for now, grief is loneliness, too, sometimes so sheer that as I hurtle through town on the gliding shocks of the gold Cadillac, my body leans forward into time and I know I am preparing for the loneliness before death, the loneliness of realizing that no human being can accompany me where I am going.

I remember walking to my great-grandmother’s casket, a child holding my small sister’s hand, and leaning over the polished wooden box to see the first body I had known in both life and death.

Against the steering wheel, I feel her moss agate ring turning on my finger, a token of life passed down to life, and when the stone touches the back of my hand I see that God is waiting, saying to me again, come away by yourself to a lonely place for a while.