The Rosary

Short Story by Amanda Taylor of Cerro Coso Community College
2014 Met Awards - 2nd Place for College Fiction

I think about death every day. I don’t know if that makes me terribly normal or just plain morbid. I guess neither of those reasons are anything to be proud of, so what’s the use in deciding? I don't care about what happens to me after I die-I’ll have to face it myself and find out for sure. What concerns me is the deadline. I wonder if I'll get snuffed out like a candle before I'm able to get married or see my children grow up. Will my good works add up in the end or will my wrong turns define my life? My great-grandfather died last October and his loss has barely begun to sink in. I knew him from his 70s on and although I knew he would eventually die, part of me felt he was an exception. He was the only father I’d known for most of my life and was a constant source of fascination. He had lost all his teeth in World War II and never wore a set of dentures for the rest of his life. I remember staring at him in disbelief when watching him crunch on tortilla chips or tear into a prime rib with nothing but his bare gums. I remember how he would kneel by his bed and pray for hours a day with his glow in the dark rosary and his prayer books, stained greasy brown by his crooked, wrinkled fingers. I thought that rosary was the greatest. Even though anything glow in the dark is a marvel when you’re eight-years-old, my grandpa’s rosary made me believe in God, the saints and maybe even Santa Claus. My grandpa was the one who took me to church as a child I remember how much I wish I could say my prayers with that rosary that lit up like my Jurassic Park poster at night. The first time I walked into his room after he died, I spotted the long forgotten rosary strewn across his night stand. I grabbed it in my hand and felt the beads shift between my fingers. I could feel the grit, deposited by years of feverish whispers and kisses, that was forever trapped between the joints between the beads. What used to be a coveted treasure suddenly lost all its former glory. It felt so utterly cheap because at that moment what I wanted more than anything was my grandpa, the person who drove me to school and played cards with me, to be alive. Instead, all I have is this odd relic of a life I will never fully understand. At that moment, I felt the full weight of his loss that I didn’t feel when I kissed his cheek as he drew his last breaths. I felt the full weight of that shame because at the moment he left this world, I was more concerned with my own life than his death. When I'm dead, will anyone hold my most prized possession and realize that I was the treasure worth keeping?