The notebook · September 16, 2026

The rosary in the drawer

There is a rosary in my bedside drawer, and I do not use it.

It comes from someone who died. It was handed to me with two or three other things, in that slightly awkward sharing out that follows a funeral, and I said yes at once, faster than for the rest. It has been there ever since. I open the drawer to get something else, and I see it.

For a long time I told myself this was respect. That an object like that is not picked up the way you pick up a pair of gloves, that it should be left to rest a while. It is a sentence that holds up well. It held for months.

One evening I tried. I said a decade with it, holding it properly, pushing the beads along one at a time. Nothing in particular happened. They are wooden beads on a string, they slide, and at the end there is a cross telling you that you have been all the way round. I think I was expecting something else, and feeling nothing relieved me first and annoyed me afterwards, in that order.

What I understood as I put it away was what I had really been asking of it. I did not want to pray with it. I wanted it to stay in the state she left it in. A rosary in use wears down, the string slackens, the beads polish where the thumb goes. Hers already carries that wear, and none of it is mine. If I use it, I add my layer over hers, and after a while nobody could tell them apart.

Except that this is exactly what a rosary is built to undergo. It is not jewelry, it is a tool, meant to pass from hand to hand and to come apart in service. Keeping it intact turns it into a display case piece, for a woman who wore it out herself.

Paul writes a line to Timothy that I can no longer read without thinking about that drawer.

having been reminded of the sincere faith that is in you; which lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and, I am persuaded, in you also.

2 Timothy 1:5 (World English Bible)

Notice that he does not keep the memory himself. He has been reminded. Something outside him brought it back, and the letter does not say what. And what travels from one generation to the next, in that sentence, is not an object at all. Nobody leaves anybody a rosary. It is a faith that lived in someone and now lives in someone else, and the verb means lodging, not storage. I think I prefer the object because an object, at least, can be put away.

I still have not put it in my pocket. I have used it three times since, and each time I laid it back flat in the drawer, which is ridiculous. But I no longer keep it intact. That is something.

In Manna, one prayer a day, to be said with whatever you have to hand.