Graduation: More Than Just The Students Saying Goodbye

 In spite of the bucketing rain outside, inside, the Unquowa School gym looked festive, all dressed up for the eighth grade graduation. Enormous containers of gorgeous flowers were featured on either side of the white- sheeted, make-do platform, a substitute for the real stage, which will be built this summer. Some parents were early, establishing good seats, and others were just milling and chatting. A joyful buzz filled the huge space.

Folding chairs of light wood formed neat rows on either side of a central aisle. On the backs of the chairs in two rows in the front were signs that read: Board Of Governors. That’s me, I thought, with a shudder of pleasure and awe, as I stood in the far back corner of the gym, just looking and watching.

The weather, being 57 degrees, I was not, after all, wearing the new flower-splashed cotton dress I wrote about in Buying The Dress. Instead I was clothed in a warmer dress and jacket, On my jacket lapel I had pinned my grandmother’s gold bar pin with the row of tiny seed pearls, which she had given me when I was fourteen. My grandmother was a founder of this school; I had worn it to honor her.

I stood there, remembering. My older sister and I and my brother all graduated from this school. It was just yesterday, wasn’t it? Gazing at the Unquowa School banners—green and white-- attached high along the walls of the gym, instinctively I reached for my cellphone. A picture of all of this, I thought, to send to my brother, whom I would call the minute I got home. I would share with him every detail of what happened here this afternoon. He would love it.

And suddenly tears flooded my eyes because my brother, that adorable eighth grader in the 1950 graduating class picture that hangs on an upstairs wall of this school, is dead. He has been dead since December 22. How could I, even for that one flashing moment have forgotten? And how could he not be alive for me to share this event with him? Shattered, I fumbled around in my pocketbook for a Kleenex and hoped no one would notice the new board member weeping-- even before the band played Pomp and Circumstance.

And that is what grief can do to you, isn’t it? So bloody weird! You think that the original tsunami of your grief has subsided, and maybe it really has. Mine seemed to me to have been reduced from an impenetrable, sodden, weighty, dark fog, to a lighter, rather filmy mist through which I could sometimes hear him laughing, or feel his presence beside me as I recognized the foolishness of life—his strong suit—or when I wrote a sentence I knew he would like. But this? To be so caught up by this moment, in this school, in childhood memory that I actually experienced that momentary forgetfulness of his death? What a shock!

I know this about grief. I’ve helped others through it but never have experienced personally the delusional assumption of a life continuing when it has ceased. Widows, I know, have caught themselves over and over again saying, “I must remember to tell . . .” and then, stunned, recalled that their husbands are no longer here to share anything with. That stabbing reality can catapult a grieving person into emptiness as vast as the Grand Canyon and it can take a while to climb out.

The graduation was wonderful: so much promising young life: girls in white dresses, wobbling on wedged high heels. Boys of basketball-player height standing with friends: other boys half their size. All of the eighth grade beaming with happiness: parents and grandparents applauding. Such exalted energy!

And I, in the front row, was lifted up by their freshness, their joy, the optimistic hope of their future, at the same time that my heart was weighted down by grief and sadness.

To my utter amazement, I was comfortable containing both.