An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow

In the reflective essay “An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow,” Richard Steele uses a recollection of his father’s death to advise his audience on how to cope with the loss of a loved one. He grabs his audience’s attention with a quick memory of his father’s funeral. He then proceeds to continue with how he confronts death at a versed age.

At the age of five, Steele attended the funeral of his father. As Steele recollects, his mother “smothered [him] in her embraces,” then she had to do one of the hardest things: tell her son that his father was dead. As Steele recalled,his mother told his “Papa could not hear [him] and would play with [him] no more, for they were [putting his body] underground, where he would never come to [them] again.”  Steele then described how he saw the reactions of his mother and was “struck with an instinct of sorrow,” even though he didn’t perceive what it meant to grieve.

As the essay progresses, Steele makes a not so predicted transition, when he switches to writing about death and grievance as an elderly person. Steele begins this transition with a fact that is very personal when it states that “[those who] are very old are better able to remember things [from their] distant youth.” As Steele continues in this transition from budding, young child to a mature, experienced man, we see a stronger, sense of wisdom in him. He explains the mind to us and how “every object that returns to our imagination raises different  passions, according to their departure.” As people get close to death, their health can take a downward spiral. Sometimes, this downward spiral can cause suffering.  For these people, “[death] is  approached with cheerfulness.” For others;  however, as Steele states, “untimely deaths are what we are more apt to lament.” “When we [allow] our thoughts [to] wander from such noble objects, and consider havoc which is made among the tender and the innocent, pity enters with an unmixed softness, and possesses all our souls at once.”

Steele’s message was that through your life from childhood to the end of your mortal life, you are going to experience tragic circumstances surrounding death. Memories of the people you lose will always bring you to different feelings, no matter if it’s not expected or if you know it is approaching. It is a normal process to grieve,  yet people should not dwell on the old memories with a painful sense of sorrow;  they should think of the memories that comfort them at the untimely matters of death.