It’s hard enough to watch this pivotal scene from Hanna-Barbera’s 1973 adaptation of Charlotte’s Web under the best of circumstances. In it, clever spider Charlotte calmly reveals to her best friend, Wilbur the pig, that she’s dying—before croaking out one last reprise of her signature lullaby, “Mother Earth and Father Time.” It’s an animated revelation as gut-wrenching as the sudden, violent murder of Bambi’s mother—but worse, somehow, because over the course of this bright animated fable, we’ve grown to know Charlotte as well as Wilbur does. We admire her. We love her. She taught us what the word “radiant” means! Her death is just about as devastating as the demise of a fictional arachnid can be.

Watching the clip now, though, adds an extra layer of poignancy—because Charlotte was voiced by Debbie Reynolds, the screen legend who died suddenly Wednesday at the age of 84. Reynolds reportedly loved the film’s source material—E.B. White’s classic 1952 novel—so much that she offered to do the part for free, and you can feel her great affection for Charlotte in every word the character speaks. Her wise, melancholy performance still stands as one of film’s great voice-acting turns. White’s words managed to do the impossible by humanizing a spider—but Reynolds’s readings were what truly brought Charlotte to life.

Hearing Reynolds-as-Charlotte speak bravely and wistfully about her coming demise (“What’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, and we die”) might just spark tears—for Reynolds; for her daughter, the late Carrie Fisher; for her son Todd and granddaughter Billie Lourd; for your own childhood. And when she reaches that final reprise—musing about the changing of the seasons, the great circle of life, even as her voice quiets to a whisper? Forget it. Listen to the words she's saying, though, and you may find some solace even in these troubled times: “How very special are we / For just a moment to be / Part of life's eternal rhyme,” she sighs. A sad message, to be sure—but a hopeful one as well.