'I wasn't ready': Graduation can be a brutal time for students and parents. Be kind.
I am a sucker for graduation ceremonies. I watched both Mary Baldwin’s commencements streaming online, the graduate schools and the undergraduate school.
I didn’t know any of the graduates. I knew very few of the faculty.
I have been gone from Mary Baldwin for a while now, but I went to 23 of these ceremonies, missing only when my own children were finishing college.
What people don’t understand is the gut-wrenching time graduation is. It is prime time for mass shootings, but for most people it does not get to that point. It doesn’t surprise me that dramatic meltdowns coincide with commencements.
The public perception is of a happy occasion. And it can be that. But there are not many bigger changes in life than watching your child walk across a stage and end a chapter of life that has been in the making for as long as you can remember.
A father told me he dropped his youngest of three off at school in the fall, came home and sat down at the piano and played. Just sat there and played. “I wasn’t ready for the last one to leave home.”
But that is what commencement signals.
And those graduating may say all the right things, and may mean them, but the closing of the door on a chapter, the scattering of friends, the insecurity of not knowing how the next chapter will unfold, can be frightening.
Even if it is not, even for those whose next steps are well-planned, it is still a rupture. A death of a sort. The End. Like in the old movies when The End actually appeared on the screen.
The passage of time can not be ignored.
The problem is that, unlike the death of people we love, we are not supposed to acknowledge how wrenching this time is. We are supposed to pretend we couldn’t be happier. That goes for the graduates and for parents and friends. The losses are profound, but we are supposed to pretend they don’t exist.
I was a very strange child. I admit it. When I finished sixth grade at Tomlinson Elementary, I went in the morning to get my report card. And I went home. Like all the other children.
But then I walked back in the afternoon when everyone was gone. And I walked around the perimeter of the school. I had been there six years. Half my life. I thought about all the time that had passed and how I would never be there again as a student.
I was pretty sure this was weird because there were no other kids there.
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During my 25 years at Mary Baldwin, I did the same thing I had done as a child finishing sixth grade. In the afternoon, when almost everyone had gone, and the chairs on Page Terrace were folded up and stacked, I went back to the campus.
And I walked. I walked around the campus and thought about the students and their teachers. And me. One year older. One more class is gone forever.
Commencement season reminds us of the passage of time, our time, our children’s time, our parents’ time. It is bittersweet.
If you know someone graduating, if you know the parents or grandparents or siblings of someone graduating, be tender. Be kind.
And try a little tenderness on yourself. This time of year is for beginnings and endings and celebrations and tears. It can hurt.
You can feel it in your bones and your heart.
Exactly two weeks before the commencement of the high school he probably attended, a young man went to Buffalo to kill. Just two weeks to the day. Coincidence?
Maybe. The Virginia Tech shooter was a senior. His horrific act was in mid-April. Just weeks before commencement. Schools need to be aware of the dangers of this time of year. But for most of us, it is just a tug of grief we don’t want to talk about, a sense of what Naomi Judd called “the river of time.”
Before she took her own life, she wrote these words: “We’re all driven by the winds of change. Seems like nothing ever stays the same. Flow on river of time; wash away the pain and heal my mind.”
Life is brutal. Take care of each other.
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Commencement difficult for some students, parents. It's a life change.
