When his apartment building caught fire in Harrisonburg, one man thought he’d lost something extremely important — it was so small that even if it wasn’t destroyed, he thought it’d never be found.
But three weeks later, he was in for the surprise of his life.
After Patrick Vigna heard his apartment was on fire, there was only one thing on his mind.
"My grandparents' wedding rings are on my wall," he said. "My grandparents passed away nine and 10 years ago. My dad gave them to me when I moved to college, and he handed them to me, and he said 'I trust you, and I want them to be with you while you're in college.'"
Vigna says he and his roommates tried to lighten the mood in the days following the fire because thinking about the things they lost that could never be replaced was too much to bare.
“We made jokes about the things that we didn’t really care about losing,” he said.