Sacred Objects

by David A. Cronin

I remember the morning my mother died. It was April 4, 1991. She was 62 years old. She had been battling cancer for several years and her body just gave out. She died very peacefully in her sleep, in her own bed, in her own home, just where she wanted to.

I lived nearby and before she died I went to visit her and my dad several times a week and would often just sit with my mother and give her foot massages. As my mother neared death she went into a coma so I stayed and held vigil with my father. At night we would lay cushions on the floor next to her bed and take turns sleeping in her room. Around 3 o'clock in the morning on the day she died my dad woke me up. He told me that she had just passed away. I had been sleeping on the floor next to her bed, when my dad, asleep in his room, woke up and felt compelled to be by her. He came into her room and sat on her bed and held her hand. A few moments later she quietly stopped breathing and was gone.

After we called my brother and other family members and the funeral home removed her body, I went back into her room and just looked around. Everything was exactly the same and yet everything was different. All her books, her inspirational tapes, her journals, all the 'stuff' that helped define her were exactly where they had been for months or years. But now, as I picked something up and simply held it, I experienced something else. It was if the object had somehow become a sacred thing.

I knew that the objects, themselves, had not changed, that it was my perceived value of them that had changed. They had once been used by my mother, but would not be any longer. I was also aware that I had never even given these same objects the slightest thought before.

Days later, after the funeral and after all the relatives had gone home, things began to settle down. I remember one day I was having a particularly hard time, missing my mother, and I found myself alone in my daughter's room. I was sitting on the floor in front of her large dollhouse I had made for her years before. I picked up a miniature table and just held it in my hands.

As I allowed myself to simply be with that little table I found myself being filled with a feeling I can only describe as joy. It felt like a sacred object too, just as the objects had felt in my mother's room. Even though my daughter was still very much alive, she had and would continue to play with that little table, it was, to me at that moment, a sacred thing. I then ran into my son's room and picked up some trading cards of super heroes and villains he played with. It offered me the same experience.

From there I went into my bedroom and over to my wife's dresser where I picked up a pin she liked to wear. It was beautiful. The pin itself was not anything special but just because it was my wife's made it a sacred object. I then, slowly, went over to my dresser where there was a small wooden box I had taken from my mother's room. It still felt like something sacred, but now there was a feeling of joy attached to it along with the sadness.

I sat on my bed for a long while, just holding that box, thinking of my different experiences of it. From not even paying any attention to it; to it being something sacred yet attached to loss; to being something sacred attached to joy and sadness simultaneously. I remember laughing and crying at the same time as I let the emotions pass through me.

I learned a lot that day, many years ago. From that experience I have formed a habit of occasionally stopping, when I am at a friend's or relative's home, and quietly picking up an object that is a part of their everyday life and just marveling at its beauty. Its beauty by virtue of nothing other than it being a part of a dear one's life…...a sacred object.

	Sacred Objects
	What would you have me know ?
	Embarrassing Moments and a Girl Named Summer
	Random Musings and Other Distractions - Part I
	Random Musings and Other Distractions - Part II
	Psychic Experience and Car Maintenance
	The Empty Frame Upon the Wall
	Things I would like to be, just for a moment.
	Echoes of the Past
	The Park