When I first read "The Dead" I was a freshman in college at University of California at Irvine. The year was 1967. That short story, especially the last lines with their reference to a snowy day in Ireland, has stayed with me.
During my years growing up south of San Francisco, I had seen snow only a few times in my life. At 17 years old, so much of my life was still ahead of me and yet I related to the experience of Gretta Conroy, Gabriel's wife. I was shaken emotionally by the story. I know I'm not the only woman who was. Now I'm thinking, too, of the men who were shaken by that story.
Having lived in Washington State for nearly 50 years, I have had somewhat more exposure to snow. Not all that much, because we rarely have more than a week total of snow here. And yet, when it does snow here, I look out my window at Scudder Pond and remember being 17 years old, reading "The Dead," and coming to the last paragraph which focuses on Gabriel's experience:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
At age 74, revisiting the story, I see how my life has unfolded in a way mostly unlike the lives of Gretta and Gabriel. This morning I feel compassion for Gretta and Gabriel and James Joyce who wrote that melancholy story. Perhaps reading that story as a 17 year old made it possible for me to have a different life than I would have had otherwise -- a life not without deep sorrow but with a growing wellspring of inner joy and peace, against all odds, that I don't take for granted.
