I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. A friend died in February. She was not just a neighbour but someone who had been a part of our lives ever since we started coming here. Being back for the summer means that her absence is a constant presence. We have been fortunate in our lives to not lose many people on a permanent basis along the way. Living abroad has meant the constant temporary loss of person and place, sometimes our selves. For my children the first big loss was that of our wonderful golden lab. After she passed we could not bear to be in the kitchen without involuntarily anticipating tripping over her as we cut vegetables and she was there particularly for the broccoli scraps. The habit of her presence only began to cease when we moved house and the substance of her being was not in the next place.
Similarly the process of empty nesting with first the one child, coincided with us moving country at the same time she did. So there wasn’t a her-shaped space in our new country, even as we created a guest room which wasn’t so much a guest room as a room for her when she could visit. Which covid quickly slashed the delusions of. With the next child to fly, a combination of yet another home and the continuation of covid, life was this weird limbo of presence and absence, being and not being. There was not so much specific as generalised absence and grief for everyone and everything that was familiar and real.
I wanted to combine this with some picture and middle grade books on death and dying and grief. Which of course means a few days delay while I research and search and put a poster together. Publishers have very homogenous and defined ideas of covers and what displays the essence of a book. Unfortunately for death this seems to converge on a blueish aqua. Culturally traditional colours such as black, grey or white are apparently not seen as right for the K-14 crowd.
“The Colour of Death” led me to this interesting graphic by David McCandless (see video below). Which makes me wonder where the dominant colour for the books come from.
Whatever colour death is, it is not anything in pastel hues. If anything it is the absence of colour, of everything. A vacuum. Which brings me to one of the best books on grief and the grieving process – which didn’t come up in my initial search with the keywords of “death” and “grief” – the extremely clever – visually and verbally – “Bug in a Vacuum” by Mélanie Watt.
I’m sitting on my balcony as the light and shade shifts after the rainstorms we’ve had in the last few days watching the clouds gather and separate and the shadows on the lake and in the lake. Where depth is darker and shallow is lighter. The depth of grief can never be lighter, and definitely not a light acqua.
Relationships are part of both mental and physical memory. And part of the grieving process is retraining my impulses to pop downstairs with some food, or to say hi or to see if she needs anything when I go down to do the groceries. To sit and hear memories of her life in Canada, the Congo and Australia and Switzerland. The unspoken lessons of growing older and less mobile and more removed from tactile life. With life experienced second and third hand through media and text. The lessons of the absence of choice in when to let go and the technicalities of a life lived and a life living well. The horror of the creep of the wish to die becoming stronger than the will to live.
And as we in turn age, these questions become less abstract and more real. When to cling on and when to let go, and who decides.
Two very interesting stories from the sporting realm are those of 
facts.
The last three books, are ones where he is part of an anthology. One thing that we’ve started doing as part of this unit, is where there are a number of “heroes” in one book, we’ve added all the names in the table of contents to our cataloging record. That helps students to find different perspectives, formats, lengths of explanation and viewpoints of the same person. We’re hoping that some students will start with one of our many combined biographies, for example the great series of 
function in FB. Many questions begin with the preamble “I know I saw X somewhere but I can’t for the life of me find it” On the left is one of the groups I’m a member of – it has 1,318 members. There are some great conversations that occur there. I went to check out “files” section – the one place where a semi-permanent record of anything could be kept. In the last 10 months exactly 20 files have been posted. That’s actually good – the “The School Librarian’s Workshop” 5,879 members and only 14 files since 2014!
group, I have quite a few options (honestly I think most people don’t even bother searching before asking a question – but that’s a whole different psycho-existential matter – like do we need to ask a question in order to “exist” / “be heard” in a group?). But the one option that would make a REAL difference in turning FB into a more useful tool for curation and knowledge building doesn’t exist – there is no option to search the files. So don’t we look at the files (no way of telling if they’re looked at) because they’re not searchable from the main menu (or in fact at all, so that’s a REAL disincentive to use them / add a lot of files to them) or because we don’t think to add to the files so we don’t use the files?
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 