On Friday, we said goodbyes to our graduating second-year students. In this international community, where these young people gather for two years in a crucible of five-students-to-a-room mayhem, of intense exams capping a rigorous curriculum, of a plethora of student-organized events, of all the pangs of teenage life, the parting is hard. They have come through a formative experience together. As the buses pull away, students are in tears. The first years, who still have close to a month of school to go, they wander back to their dormitories in a scattered trail of twos and threes, clasped arms, a few laughs and a few sobs. It is a beautiful evening, eleven o’clock and still half light in this northern latitude now in the late spring. This week, the dandelions burst out in their riotous yellow to join the pale purple flowers they will hang together with for a short time.
Several students asked me what the graduation feels like for a teacher. I tried to tell it honestly–from the broadest perspective it’s just happy. At the end of these two years, this is the right time to be going. You should not stay here, after all, because life is waiting for you in other places, and you have done the things that you came here to do. We are celebrating your accomplishments and your growth, the way that you have passed through darkness or persevered even in continued darkness, the contributions you have made to our community, the dreams you have for your communities of the future–here you go. Go out there as you should go out there and leave us behind with these memories that will linger for a time until the next year’s group stands up and takes the center of our attention–
That is the first lip of sadness, I see, because implicit in the cycle of each school year is the repetition regardless of the individuals who fill the shoes. We move through the same round of greetings, teachings, deadlines, fears, victories, that this is the time students start asking for help making a study schedule, and then comes a knock on the door, and it’s a different face with the same question, and there is something like seasons in it, the way each spring is like the other springs, and what do we remember of one spring or the next winter, how they blend together in a line until we hold up the general–“summer,” we say, and we envision sun and warmth divorced of time and place, the way individuals fade into a tapestry, and this makes me sad.
I remember a particular spring, the second of four that I spent living in Mounds View, Minnesota. I was a new teacher, in the first years of my relationship with my now-husband, Taren. That spring I found a park a mile away, a meandering trail through prairie with a forest alongside that tumbled down a hill to a flat expanse of floodplain trees, sinewed through with a lazy-flowing creek that visitors occasionally canoed along. That spring, the rushing rains had swelled that creek to bursting, submerging the flat plain. When I descended from the main trail into the woods, made my way to the water’s edge, it was sunset, golden glow through the young leaves. I told Taren on the phone, never had I seen anything more beautiful, the illuminated forest reflected in that water still, stretching half a mile or more across to where the land rose up again, and I stayed to watch until the gold light left.
All the summer, and the fall and winter onward, I returned often to that park and wandered the long trails. I remembered the overwhelming beauty of that spring flood and awaited its return eagerly. On the day after a spring rain, I descended that dirt trail to the floodplain, to my lookout before this single enormous tree. The flood never came. It must flood every year, I thought. Seasons take their cycles and repeat, and the day of the year is the same, even perhaps the golden light, and I went close to the river where the young marsh plants were erupting in new life. In my four years there, I never saw it flood again.
One of my colleagues, my friend Avis, after the flurry of the hugs and thanks and photographs under the blessed blue sky, she named something that I too was feeling. It was my first time seeing Avis in five months–she has just had a child and is on leave, and she brought her baby to the graduation. Several of us sat together as the place grew calm, as the graduates filtered away back to their rooms for final packing, preparing for the coming tears. Avis said of these partings with the graduates how difficult it was to put into a few words what one feels. We say, I’m proud of you. We say, you have given so much to our community, and we will miss you. These things are deeply true, but the words only reach partway.
For I see that these graduates are the same as those before, but they are not at all the same, and I am happy for the group but I am sad to say goodbye to the individual, and I am so happy for that individual but I am sad for myself, and I am happy for myself who has come through another year but I am sad for the group that is leaving this place of relative safety and calm, and each year group is different in the people that make it up and, if I were perceptive enough, in the group as a whole, and I am just lost sometimes internally and I don’t see. They are different as each spring is different from the previous spring. They have left before I truly know them.
Of the nearly hundred graduates, there are a small handful whom I felt keenly upon these goodbyes how much I will miss, and I know that the intensity of that too will fade as I remember the handful of last year and of the year before. I have to reach into my memory for them and recall the feeling. There it is. How proud of you I am. You made so many contributions to this community, and how much we will miss you. You are going on to build your next adventures, as it should be, because you should not stay here any longer.
Words like trees 