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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK222 Jack Fritscherwith me. Thy rod and Thy staff, these comfort me. I will willingly give up myself to serve you.Later, after lunch, I dropped my copy of Sigrid Undset%u2019s novel Kristin Lavransdatter. Just dropped it. Dropped it right to the floor. Lock told me, dumbfounded, stood in front of me, crying, weeping, and told me.He was dead.Jack Kennedy, my Jack, was dead.The day had dawned so gray and sweet, so muted in dry November. April%u2019s fool, a joke, had come to November. Till that noon hour, till today, April was the cruelest month. This feeling. Fragmented. What makes a man so alive one minute? What lays him low, snuffs him out the next? He was the only person I really knew in all the outpost of the world. With any other death, the past could have died. But with him, all the bright future, somehow linked with my passion of giving, vanished. As long as he was being president, I could see myself being priest. Alter Christus. Alter Jack. Oh, God. Civilization slipped from us. Violent. Bloody. Jack%u2019s brains were all over Jackie%u2019s yellow roses. Big D, little A, double L, A, S. All the boys were in tears. The priests were in tears. For the first time in history, television sets were carried into the recreation halls and left on and on and on. I could talk to no one. Alone in my room, hours later, the night of the longest day, I pulled my tiny journal from inside my torn shoe box and wrote before the onrushing terror of darkness, psalmish, sighing, keening, kaddish, half-dead myself.22 November 1963Tonight, oh Lord, the dun land mournsdisbelieving believing,dessicated leaves of this weekbefore Thanksgiving (feast from his New England)rattle and skitter across brown grass.This Fall%u2019s been a drought on the land,ended now,well-watered by weeping.John Kennedy has passed.Safe-comfort they had hawked,sixty-nine cents a pound.He could have bought it and did not,chose not to recline in wealth.Sought rather service.Sacrificed until sacrificed.