Charlotte’s Web

When I was a five year old with the chicken pox, my mother read me Charlotte’s Web. Near the end, when Charlotte the spider died, I could not be consoled.

My awareness of death was formed then, and yes — by fiction.

An avid reader, I certainly didn’t shy away from trying to get my head further around the concept. From Black Beauty through The Yearling, I put myself through sorrow and mourning on a regular basis. I also went through an extended “beheaded queens” phase, riding my bicycle to the public library to exchange books on Marie Antoinette for others on Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn. I tried to understand how it felt to know when, where, and how you were going to die. I tried to imagine the night before, the creeping dread, the walk to the guillotine, the event itself.

Then, when I was eleven, my father died. He had a heart attack and died instantly – he was forty years old, and he and my mother were on their first trip without us. My mother had to bring his body back in a sealed coffin, so we never saw him again.

To say that I became even more obsessed with death would be an understatement.

We were raised without the religion that (according to the books) sustained so many beheaded queens, and I’ve never managed to believe in an afterlife. My childhood curiosity devolved pretty quickly into anxiety, all-out fear and self-soothing behaviors, primarily reading and television. Stories. They continue to sustain me.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen, an astute and kind man. Along the way, I lost several friends and a dearly loved cousin, my age. My step-father died when I was 41, unexpectedly in an accident. For a first world, middle class woman of that age, I had lost a lot of people.

I took to reading the few pages about the death of Charlotte the spider at each funeral and memorial service. I also reread the book, out loud, to each of my three children.

I still think of Charlotte and her legacy – not her webs, the words she wove to save Wilbur — but the turning of the seasons, the three spider daughters who decide to remain in the old barn with their mother’s friend, and the spot in Wilbur’s heart that will always be reserved for Charlotte. It still makes me cry.