On Graduation Day

I recall my surprise when my mother told me she hadn’t attended her graduation from college, or after her graduate school experience. After a childhood of watching movies and TV shows in which graduation seemed like such a vital rite of passage, it seemed absurd for someone to skip it as if it were an inconvenience. I knew my parents to be practical people who didn’t do much for the sake of tradition or sentimental value; I knew them to have been married at a courthouse, attended only by immediate family. But to miss graduation?

I went to my high school graduation, and my college one, too. But when it came time for the next graduation ceremony I was eligible for, after completing my first master’s degree at Hopkins seven and a half years later, there came a question as to whether I would invest time in the ceremony, let alone the money for all of the graduation regalia.

I was at a different point in my life. High school and college had been immersive and all-encompassing. These school experiences included my academic life, my social life, and the overwhelming majority of my ambitions whether it was pursuing a leadership role at the newspaper or winning awards specific to that school environment.

But I did that first grad program part time, going to night classes once a week while I worked full time over the course of a four-and-a-half-year period. I’d learned a good bit and made some friends, but this all made up a smaller portion of my world view at that time relative to my professional obligations and even my social circles at work--not to mention a remote life back up in New York with my family and the people I still considered my closest friends.

So, I skipped that graduation, and I’ve never had any meaningful regrets about it, even when I did elect to attend my next graduation ceremony, to commemorate the completion of my MFA at Oregon State. That last degree represented something I’d wanted for a lot longer, from aspiring to an MFA as I finished my undergrad, to planning and saving money before my MA was done, to applications, to moving across the country to enter a new life.

I can’t claim that graduation experience in Oregon was life changing, but the importance of it occurred to me during the day, as I was seated near friends from the past two years out of happenstance--because of where our names fell alphabetically.

A sense of falseness can come from those graduations that don’t mark true endings--a feeling that they have more to do with ceremony than actual endings because the same people might stay in your life, and the same places. But when I look back on my high school graduation, and perhaps the series of graduation parties to follow that weekend; when I reflect on college graduation and that last night at the bar afterward; when I reflect on those final days in Oregon, I feel a different sensation--not of routine, but meaningful change. I had my friends in each of these settings. But all the more so, I had my friendly acquaintances. These are the people I’m still Facebook friends with, and whom I may well say hello to if I passed them on the street. People I saw more or less every day for a period of years, whom its odd to admit I haven’t seen since.

In our culture, graduations are viewed as celebrations, but there is, then, something far sadder in the recognition that graduation can mean more than the end of a school experience, but also the end of a chapter of life. When I look back on these graduation days, years removed, I think of them as though they really were the last time I saw dozens, maybe hundreds of people who used to be a part of my life.

There’s a surprising moment in many people’s lives when they realize graduation ceremonies are most often, most officially referred to as Commencement, and that commencement means the start of something. At their most poetic, these events represent the new beginnings one might pursue with the benefit of their school experience behind them. In a sense, this outlooks shuns the sorrow of farewell and endings, in favor of a look to what might be a brighter future, a bunch of baby birds grown and ready for flight.

And I think of my mother. That she wouldn’t attend her own ceremonies; was that an indication that she was already prepared for flight, no further ceremony necessary?

In the weeks ahead, the National Center for Education Statistics suggests somewhere in the vicinity of three-to-four million Americans will receive with some sort of degree from a domestic college or university. Reaching their own endings. Their own new beginnings. Whether they realize it or not in the moment, their lives may never be quite the same again. Is it more noteworthy that, in the age of COVID-19, most of these millions will, at least for the time being, move forward without a formal graduation ceremony in which they join their peers and in which disparate families come together, maybe for the first, maybe for the only time?

At the university where I teach now, there are intentions of still having a ceremony, date to be announced, perhaps combined with the next winter commencement. A graduation tinged with a homecoming vibe, or a feel like those first Thanksgivings back from college, when everyone is back. A little awkward. Maybe a little forced, with an inevitable drop off in attendance, because not everyone will still be around town or travel back.

But I hope some will. Those who it means something to. Because isn't that what ceremony is ultimately about on a larger scale? It's what people make of it. And for as trite as the wish may be, I hope the Class of 2020 makes the most of it.