The Drawer and the Giving

I keep a small supply of Miraculous Medals in my kitchen drawer. I have done this for about twelve years, ever since a friend gave me a handful after a pilgrimage and said, simply: Pass them on when the moment comes.

I did not think the moment would come very often. I was wrong.

A neighbor’s husband was going in for heart surgery and she had not slept in days. A young woman at my book group mentioned, almost in passing, that her mother had stopped recognizing her. A colleague’s son was leaving for a year abroad, and she could not stop crying about it. A man I barely knew sat next to me at a funeral and said he had not been inside a church since his own wedding, thirty years ago, and he did not know what he was feeling.

In each of these moments, there was a point where words ran out. Where what was needed was not more conversation, but something physical — something that could be held, carried, slipped into a pocket. Something that said: I am thinking of you. You are not alone in this.

The medal was what I had. So I gave it.

I am aware that this can seem like a small gesture in the face of large suffering. A woman’s husband is about to have his chest opened, and I offer a small piece of metal. What does that accomplish?

I have thought about this. Here is what I have come to believe: the gesture is not small. The object is small. The gesture is something else — a way of saying that the person in front of me is not invisible, that their pain has been witnessed, that there is a tradition of accompaniment that has been available to people in exactly their situation for nearly two centuries.

The medal does not fix anything. It does not steady the surgeon’s hands, or restore the memory, or make the year apart shorter. But it says something that needs to be said: You are held. Not only by me, but by something larger than me.

The giving I remember most clearly was not planned. I was visiting my neighbor in the hospital — the one whose husband was waiting for surgery. She was sitting in the corridor outside his room, alone, staring at the floor. She had been there for hours.

I sat down beside her. We did not talk much. At some point I reached into my bag — I had put a medal there that morning without thinking about it — and I put it in her hand.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she said: My mother had one of these.

I said: You can keep this one.

She held it for the rest of the afternoon. She told me later that she had kept it in her pocket every day for the weeks that followed — through the surgery, the recovery, the slow return to ordinary life. She said she was not sure she believed in anything, but that holding it helped. That it felt like holding something that had been held by many hands before hers.

I think that is what passing it on means. Not a transaction. Not a promise of a particular outcome. Just a gesture that says: Here. Take this. You are part of something that continues.

I still have medals in my kitchen drawer. I still give them away when it seems right.

It seems right more often than I expected.