A Beautiful Cemetery on an Old Hill

After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Toombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden wayRegardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

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

Emily Dickinson

This is the cemetery where Michael is buried. It's a beautiful cemetery on an old hill in the town where we lived. I don't know why but there are times in my life that I go right back into my grief as though it happened only yesterday.

I found this poem yesterday in a box where I keep a few of Michael's things. He did an essay on this poem when he was in college. It blows my mind that he wrote a paper on suffering and grief.

Life to me seems not to happen at all in a linear fashion but more like an overlapping of time. One day an 18 year old is writing about a poem about grief that so many years later his widow pulls from a box while she is crying.

I believe it's a message. I know his soul goes on. I know he is with me and I know he needed me to read this.