Class ring of Maine woman’s late husband found in Finland

After 47 years, a Maine woman has been reunited with her late husband’s high-school class ring, discovered across the Atlantic Ocean in the forests of Finland.
Debra McKenna, 63, lost the Morse High School senior class ring in the fall of 1973. Her high-school sweetheart, Shawn McKenna, gave it to her just before he departed for college. She said the ring had been lifted from a department-store bathroom after she removed it to wash her hands, but her then-boyfriend didn’t seem to mind.
“I left my name and number [at the store] but never got contacted by anybody, and that was it,” McKenna told Bangor Daily News.
“He said, ‘It’s just a ring,’ ” she added. “He was cool with it.”
The couple went on to wed in 1977 and had three kids together. Debra, a former hairdresser, and Shawn, an entrepreneur and adjunct professor, were married for 40 years before he died in 2017 after a six-year battle with cancer.

McKenna said she’d hardly given the ring a thought until January, when Marko Saarinen, a sheet metal worker from Finland, appeared in the Facebook group for the Morse High School Alumni Association.
On Jan. 12, Saarinen left a comment on a recent announcement by the group.
“Hello from Finland! I was metal detecting in deep forest and found this high school ring. Is this your class ring?” he posted, along with two images of a silver class ring with a blue stone that clearly shows imprints of “Morse High School” and “1973.” He added that the engraving “SM” could be found along the inside of the band.

Hours later, the group’s administrator Kathleen Nadeau informed him that they had found the ring’s owner.
Saarinen, 38, told Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat that he had been using his metal detector in a city park in Kaarina in the southwest part of the country when he unearthed the ring.

“Usually my findings are bottle caps or other junk,” he told the paper. “This has been an amazing discovery. Best yet,” he later told CNN.
According to Bangor Daily, the ring’s rightful owner was not hard to track, as only two senior classmates at that school in 1973 bore the initials SM, and only one of them would have fit the large ring.
“We had no other males in the class with those same initials,” Nadeau told CNN. “I believe there were about 216 of us. There was a female in our class with the same initials, but from the photos, we knew it was a man’s ring.”
McKenna has no idea how the ring could have ended up 3,500 miles away, but she noted a few strange coincidences. Her husband had spent some time working in Finland in the 1990s, but he hadn’t seen the ring in 20 years by that point. Also, the word “Shipbuilders,” the Morse High School mascot, was featured on the ring — and Saarinen just so happens to build ships for a living.
But she told Bangor Daily that she thinks it’s more than just luck.
“Shawn used to say there’s no such thing as coincidences,” said McKenna, who believes the recovered ring is a message from beyond.
“He’s letting me know that things are good, that the decisions I’m making are right and he’s behind me on it. Like he has been through my whole life,” she said to CNN.
At the time of Bangor Daily’s report, McKenna had not yet spoken to Saarinen.
“It’s very touching, in this world of negativity, to have decent people step forward and make an effort,” she said of her Finnish treasure hunter. “There are good people in the world, and we need more of them.”