I remember, remember, remember.

This week, an Irish priest told me that when you hold rosary beads, you are holding hands with Mary.  I imagine holding hands with my Mother Mary and comfort fills me.  The priest smiles and nods, agrees with me that it’s a beautiful image, the holding of hands.  My heavenly Mother helps me to remember Mom, in the moment that she handed me her rosary beads.

“Here, Jeanne, I want you to have these,” said Mom, as she hands me the red, rosy-garland of glass beads with a silver crucifix.  In the midst of the beads is linked an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the same image that hung in my Polish grandparents’ livingroom, long ago.  As I look at the Jesus of my youth, I feel the same horror, and the sorrow of his bleeding heart, that I felt as a little girl.  I do the same thing as I did back then, cover that image in my head with one of Baby Jesus being held by Mother Mary, and think of the Hail Mary prayer, a powerful weapon against evil that will bring me to true peace.

Mom sets a black pocketbook, where she kept her rosary beads, on the side of her nursing home bed.  She lets go of holding hands with Mother Mary so I can have a turn.  Perhaps Mom knows better than me for once.  Perhaps she knows that in a few months, she will lose her sense of speech, on the downhill slide to death.  Perhaps she thinks the rosary will serve me better than her, and sees in my eyes, the sorrow, the uselessness, the bleeding struggles, the things that I remember, that just won’t go away and leave me alone.