10/04/2025
Thank you all who were able to attend Garth Bond's celebration of life today--and thanks in particular to Luther and Molly--and for all the students and alums during the open mic portion--for your beautiful testimony of Garth's love and care. For those who weren't able to attend, here are the remarks Professor Range and Professor Barnes gave on behalf of the English department.
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When we speak of people we love in the past tense, it doesn’t feel right. The verb “was” stops us short. Especially for someone like Garth, only the present tense seems fitting.
Garth’s legacy is vibrancy, movement, joy. Perpetual motion. Fizzy energy. You see him running down the sidewalk toward you, his tie flapping in the wind, chasing you down to give you a word of encouragement or share with you a random anecdote (probably about Elvis). You watch him gesturing wildly with his hands, caught up in a wave of enthusiasm about an idea, and though you might have to duck (he’s REALLY gesturing with those hands, watch out!), you find yourself gladly pulled along into the wave. You walk by his open office door, knowing if you have something on your mind, you can go in, and he will listen to you intently. Knowing that (to use a Garthism) “reasonable people could disagree,” he may also argue with you with generosity and goodwill. Sometimes, you walk by that same open office door, and you realize he’s gone home for the night and has forgotten to close it. You see a piece of pepperoni pizza weaving and bobbing in a crowd—no, it’s just Garth in costume, circulating at a Halloween party, the center and source of multiple far-ranging, animated conversations. You see the marginalia in his books—a page falls open—his handwriting catapults from the paper—and you learn something new about a text you’ve read dozens of times.
We are here to celebrate Garth’s boundless life, but we are also here to grieve together. In our urge to honor what we love about our friend, it’s so easy to brush aside the act of mourning–to feel like we must focus on the celebration of Garth’s life and not the deep sense of loss we all feel because of his death. Right now, we want to say that we miss hearing Garth’s voice, we miss talking books with him, we miss walking by his open door. We miss his kindness, his compassion, his sense of fairness and justice. We miss the wind rushing in his wake, unable to keep up with him. And so we speak of our friend–and to speak of him in this way continues the act of friendship. It keeps his memory alive, yes, but it also serves as a testimony of the very force, the power, of his friendship–the quintessential liveliness of it.
As many of you know, Garth taught a course on the poet John Milton. We wanted to end our part of the program today by sharing an excerpt from Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy (so, get ready for lots of talk about shepherds!). Milton wrote the poem shortly after his friend Edward King died in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea in 1637. We hope this excerpt will serve as a fitting tribute to our colleague and friend.
from “Lycidas”
Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat'ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear. . . .
For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill,
Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;
Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,
Oft till the star that rose at ev'ning bright
Toward heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel. . . .
Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high
Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves; . .
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the Saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more:
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore,
In thy large recompense, and shalt be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
For who would not sing for Garth?
