Six years ago, six years . . . How quickly time passed! It might have happened yesterday. The boss took his hands from his face; he was puzzled. Something seemed to be wrong with him. He wasn't feeling as he wanted to feel. 

This quote demonstrates how time continually slips away despite the pain of the person perceiving it. Time also does affect the emotions of a person, no matter how strong and immovable the person believes them to be. The boss expects to feel as he did the first time he heard the tragic news of his son’s death, but he can no longer recreate the feeling because it’s been too long. Life is moving on, moving past his son, and he has no control over slowing or stopping it.

And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was . . . He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar. For the life of him he could not remember.

The boss’s age is highlighted at the end of the story when he forgets that he had just been thinking about his son’s death. The importance of the forgotten subject matter demonstrates the affect time has on the boss’s cognitive abilities. The quote reveals that all aging people are susceptible to the inevitability of forgetting things. Ironically, it is the same mortality that he recognized earlier in Mr. Woodifield’s memory slip and that he pitied. Try as the boss might to keep his grief fresh, time still erodes his memory. The final line of the story is tragic in that it confirms the boss’s worst fear: time will rob him of his ability to hold his grief close and he may somehow forget to mourn his son.