This Is the Hour of Lead

Setting sun over the Jemez mountains in New Mexico

One of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems ends with this stanza:

This is the Hour of Lead–
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow–
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

I’ve been thinking of this poem as I remember my son Will whose funeral was three years ago. I have taken some comfort from hearing that freezing to death as he did in a Colorado April blizzard was—as Dickinson, who never literally experienced it—imagined it. And I’ve also been wondering, as perhaps all of us do who have lost the people we loved, why anniversaries of death are so hard to remember. Is it our fear of pain? Some helpful numbness we might be ashamed to admit is a balm, a relief?

I think in fact there is no forgetting, but a different kind of remembering that goes on all the time in a deep, hidden layer, what we moderns call the subconscious and older generations might have called the soul, an unwilled, slowly moving invisible stream that begins with the death and continues until our death, even though we may never know it exists. Grief, after all, is so ordinary; no one escapes it; and if by some chance we escape the death of people we love—surely not true of anyone over thirty—we still have all around us the death of this beautiful world which we love and destroy: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves/All men, both great and small…”

Our mourning for this world is silent, unconscious, deep and perhaps some day—perhaps!—will bring about change before it is too late. After all, this setting sun over the Jemez mountains in New Mexico will surely rise again at dawn tomorrow…

And then there is the inescapable, unexpected kindness and generosity that surrounds us, from the woman in the long line for lunch today who told me to move to the front—she was part of a clot of people, all ordering from one server while the other server stood waiting—to the friend who took two filled plates away from his Thanksgiving dinner (always too much food) to give to a woman he’d seen sitting on the sidewalk. She was gone when he got there with the plates but surely some ripple below her mind assured her, maybe for the first time, that she was not alone.

And there is hope as well as sadness as the trembling line that ends Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby states, “So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

In My Family 21 Favorites of 2021 Emily Dicknson William Bingham Iovenko Scott