December 6: Good-bye, Sad Day, Joy Harjo, "Mourning Song," New Cartoon

"Good-bye!" she whispered.  Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her legs at him.

The last words Charlotte speaks in the book.  The last action she performs.  A farewell to her best friend, whose life she has just saved.  After this paragraph, she basically disappears.  Retreats from the narrative and dies.  For me, it's the saddest paragraph in Charlotte's Web.

It has been an extremely sad day.  This morning, I attended the funeral for my colleague Ray.  Sixty-six years old.  Father.  Teacher.  Mentor.  Beloved friend.  The mass at Saint Peter's Cathedral was beautiful.  When the choir began singing "Panis Angelicus" at the beginning of the service, I began sobbing.  It went downhill from there.  By the end, I was pretty much a red-eyed, snotty mess, as were all my other friends from the English Department.  There will never be another person like Ray, who truly knew the definition of the word "servant."  He lived to help people.

I'm pretty tired this evening.  Emotionally drained.  In the days to come, I will pick up the pieces of my life in the English Department and move on.  Somehow.  There is a huge, Ray-sized vacuum in the halls and offices.  Today was the end and the beginning.

Joy Harjo has a poem about grieving that I think is appropriate for this evening.  It comes from her book The Woman Who Fell From the Sky.  

Farewell, Ray.  My friend.  I mourn you.  Miss you.  Will never, ever forget the lessons you taught me.

Saint Marty is a better person because of you.

Mourning Song

by:  Joy Harjo

It's early evening in the small world, where gods gamble for good weather as the sky turns red.  Of grief rattling around in the bowl of my skeleton.  How I'd like to spit you out, turn you into another human, or remake the little dog spirit who walked out of our house without its skin toward an unseen land.  We were left behind to figure it out during a harvest turned to ashes.  I need to mourn with the night, turn to the gleaming house of bones under your familiar brown skin.  The hot stone of our hearts will make a fire.  If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt; instead let's praise that which would distract us with despair.  Make a song for death, a song with yellow teeth and bad breath.  For loneliness, the house guest who eats everything and refuses to leave.  A song for bad weather so we can stand together under our leaking roof, and make a terrible music with our wise and ragged bones.

Confessions of Saint Marty

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