As we approach the end of another tumultuous year, I recall completing one of my bucket list items a few years ago. It had a lasting impact.

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is an open-air memorial featuring the prominent, solitary figure of Abraham Lincoln seated in a chair, gazing directly ahead and slightly down with a look of solemnity. His second inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1865, is engraved on the north wall, and his Gettysburg Address, delivered Nov. 19, 1863, is engraved on the south wall. Both speeches are considered to be among the most notable in American history.

The first sentence of the Gettysburg Address is, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The last sentence from the second inaugural is, “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I had read those words since childhood, but the impact of standing next to the sculpture that dwarfs the people beneath is hard to describe. The 170-ton statue rises 30 feet from the floor, including the 19-foot seated figure upon an 11-foot pedestal. The marble is smooth as glass, impeccably white.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French showed Lincoln’s expressive hands, which rest on the enormous arms of a semicircular ceremonial chair. French used casts of his own hands to ensure the correct placement. The six Piccirilli brothers, who had come to the United States with their father, well-known stone carver Massa, did the actual carving of the marble: Ferruccio, Attilio, Furio, Masaniello, Orazio and Getulio. I wonder how the six brothers got along during that arduous task.

The colossal figure matches Lincoln’s heroic efforts to preserve our new country. Surrounded by other tourists, I craned my neck to see our 16th president’s face as he looked upon the millions of people who visit the memorial each year. We wandered around in shorts and T-shirts, holding phones up to capture the best image of a beloved president.

What must he think of us now?

The Lincoln Memorial has become a sacred space, especially for contralto Marian Anderson. The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing before an integrated audience at the organization’s Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange a performance by Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday that year, 1939. She sang for a live audience of 75,000 and a nationwide radio audience. (You can see a video of her performance on Youtube.) The steps are symbolic because there are 87 of them leading up to Lincoln’s statue. The opening line, “Four score and seven years ago ... ,” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is 87 years.

Another iconic event occurred Aug. 28, 1963. During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech to 250,000 people. The march honored the president who had issued the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years earlier.

I left the monument and walked down the long flight of stairs, with no railings. The Piccirilli brothers released from the cold block of marble the weary face of a man who preserved a nation that went to war with itself, leaving 618,222 soldiers dead.

There is an inscription engraved above the statue of Lincoln by Royal Cortissoz, who wrote about culture and art for the New York Tribune. He wrote the epitaph carved above the Lincoln statue, which brought tears to my eyes. “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.” That is where our American heart resides.

Kathleen Vallee Stein is a Monrovia writer.