At first, Lee Ann Jones says she just stared at what a client brought into her jewelry studio: Two tiny strips of paper that displayed the last heartbeats of a mom and a dad who had died within weeks of each other from COVID-19.
Her client received the vials from the hospital where her parents passed, a souvenir that neither the woman nor her best friend quite knew what to do with in the moment. Her friend brought the vials to Jones, and they hoped the jeweler might help design something that honored her parents’ lives and their lifetime of love—both for one another and their daughter.
Those two ECG readings inspired Jones to create what she describes as a blend of custom and memorial jewelry—a modern take on a Victorian tradition of wearing a locket, cross, cameo, or other symbol of a lost loved one. In this current pandemic, having a way to honor this double bereavement in a heartfelt way felt important and necessary, Jones says.
“It made me cry. It made me sentimental. It made me reflective. But I’m also so honored and privileged to be asked to make something like this,” Jones says.
Jones, who runs the Lee Jones Collection in San Antonio, says her client gave her open parameters to create something with the ECG readings. She thought about a locket, but that felt like it might hide away the memory. Instead, Jones says she wanted her client to be able to talk about her parents and their story, and the jewelry had to be more visual for that to happen.
The coronavirus pendant is made of 14 karat gold. It shows the lines where the client’s parents had their final heartbeats, and a ruby set into the pendant marks their mutual love. Her client asked Jones to add their initials, so she engraved them on the pendant’s back.
Every step of this process required a special touch, Jones says. The story is even more dramatic in another way, given that Jones started her career as an attorney who represented hospitals in medical malpractice defense cases. Her work with hospitals made her aware how rare it was to receive such an item, like the heartbeat ECG readings, so she wanted to preserve them for her client.
“The vials are so tiny—like something people might throw into the ocean, like a glass bottle. They’re maybe two inches long. I was sweating just thinking about how I was going to get the strips out of those bottles. What if I tore them? Every emotion was going through my mind,” Jones says.
“I sat and looked at them for two or three days. I thought about how to present them, and I landed on lining them up to where the strips cut off. Their heartbeats almost lined up, one right after the other,” Jones says. “I added a ruby to show the eternal love for the husband and wife.”
This piece is one of the most memorable a jeweler can create, Jones says, so she decided to make it a permanent part of her business. Her idea, which she calls Bespoke, is to give people another way to look at mourning jewelry through custom work that blends heirloom pieces, stones, and other important souvenirs with a lasting memory through one of her designs.
Jones says she also changed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and her storytelling became more introspective. She hopes her new work and her overall design approach when it comes to bespoke mourning jewelry helps people in the same way it has been helping her over these past two years.
“It’s the most special thing I’ve ever done,” Jones says. “In a lifetime of jewelry design, I hope there’s something else like it that comes along, but I’m not sure if it will.”
Top: Texas jewelry designer Lee Ann Jones is a former attorney–turned–jeweler who says her new Bespoke jewelry collection will focus on making meaningful, modern mourning pieces for clients, like a recent pendant for a woman who lost both of her parents to COVID-19 (photos courtesy of Lee Ann Jones).
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