Graduation Blues

{COLLEGE LIFE} Graduation Blues

Coming to terms with a global pandemic, graduation, and growing up.

by ABIGAIL STERLING

When I packed my duffel bag I began cycling through all the contagious smile. We shared many for spring break, I thought things I would miss: Mayfest, going Thanksgivings with his family at I was going back home to the bars one last time, and saying their house, and my siblings and for a week. I brought one Syracuse goodbye to the professors who have I would fight for a chance to play crewneck and a pair of gray joggers, guided me throughout the years. on the old pinball game in their mindful that I always overpack. My There would be no group project living room, amazed by the bright wardrobe has been supplemented meetings in Bird Library, no more lights and cartoon sounds. Until his with high-school relics — ill-fitting coffee from People’s Place on the passing, I viewed the pandemic as an marching band sweatpants and a steps of Hendricks Chapel, and no inconvenient interruption. Though I t-shirt I wore in gym class. I struggle commencement ceremony in May, hadn’t seen Bob in years, suddenly, to complete the last few assignments marking the end of my four-year everything felt very real and to earn my college degree in my collegiate career. I let the grief immediate. If a healthy man who had childhood bedroom. Middle-school overwhelm me as my mom hugged wrestled for Columbia University sports trophies stand on a shelf, me, my tears darkening the bright could die from this, then anyone and old stuffed animals huddle in orange of her Syracuse sweatshirt. was at risk. Now when I speak to my my closet next to a box of Sweet 16 grandparents, I wonder if it could be birthday cards. Facing an uncertain Since mid-March, schools, the last time. ‘adult’ world from the confines of the restaurants, and shopping malls have room that housed me as a child, the been closed. Masks hide our faces, I anticipated this spring and irony sometimes feels overwhelming. toilet paper is the most precious and summer as my last few months of My worn and well-loved Harry Potter rationed commodity, and interacting being a young adult, with a clear plan books sit next to crisp ahead of me. I would college textbooks, and at night my head rests “During the last week of April, I sat spend the summer job hunting, and hopefully on sheets I picked out from a magazine when cross-legged on my bed, watching my land a position in New York City. I had I was 12, while I wonder what will happen if the virus lasts forever. final college class over Zoom. When pictured my first shoebox apartment, filled with flea market At some point the meeting ended, I wondered if I finds and warm yellow light from the city during my extended spring break, I sat should have felt something.” streets. Now my plans have been put on hold on the sand-colored indefinitely, and I begin couch in my parents’ living room and with strangers incite fear. Anxious to dial back on my dreams. It feels mindlessly cycled through the social that the people we pass may spread like the real world has been forced media apps on my phone. The news an invisible illness that will ravage upon me, covering my future with blared in the background, and I could our lungs. A global pandemic has torn the dark ink of uncertainty. I feel hear my mom and sister talking in through every aspect of our lives, prematurely old, like the last of my the kitchen. And when my phone and we have lost a sense of normalcy. youth has already been spent. lit up with an email from Syracuse Trips to the grocery feel apocalyptic. University, I snapped to attention. We scour every shelf for the last At the same time, I recognize I hoped for another reassuring loaf of sourdough as if our survival my luck. Not all students have a message that in-person classes depends on it and I’m reminded of all home to go back to or live in a place would resume. Instead, the email the things I forgot to savor—my last that is healthy and conducive to announced the thing I was dreading. meal at a restaurant and an aimless learning. My parents both have In-person classes were suspended for browse through the aisles of TJMaxx. their jobs and can work safely from the remainder of the semester, and home while others are exposed to my education would shift online. My A few weeks ago, one of my the virus daily. I am privileged to senior year had effectively ended. dad’s friends died from COVID-19. be able to social distance from my Bob was a powerful man with a home, and acknowledging this is

just as important as acknowledging the collective anxiety that has swept the world. That it doesn’t mean that I can’t, or shouldn’t, mourn the loss of major life events. Collectively, we’ve all been overcome by a sense of numbness. Technology has subtracted the emotion from all the ‘lasts’ the senior class looked forward to. During the last week of April, I sat cross-legged on my bed, watching my final college class unfold over Zoom. When the meeting ended and I closed my laptop, wondering if I should have felt something. Instead of letting my feelings sit with me, and acknowledging either the relief or grief I felt, I rushed downstairs for dinner. I imagine those feelings sitting in a tidy cardboard box, ready to be unpacked at a later date.

Because of the virus, our inperson graduation has been pushed back into the fall. Despite the University’s best intentions, it won’t be the same. Not everybody will be able to attend, and most of the gravitas of graduation will have evaporated. I pictured running to find my friends the minute the ceremony ended, so we could throw our caps in the air together, and once we caught them, wrapping each other up in a hug, tears streaming into wide smiles.

Though graduation isn’t really for us, it’s for our families. It’s for my grandparents, who didn’t get a chance to attend college. It’s for my dad, who never graduated. It’s for my mom, who worked her ass off to put herself through school. It’s for all those who can’t be with us like my Great-Great Aunt Lupe, who would’ve been at every Syracuse basketball game possible. Or my Grandma Roddy, whose brain is wracked with Alzheimer’s Disease. She can still sit down at her piano and play any Broadway showtune, revisiting notes and keys committed to memory even as she forgets the people around her. My graduation ceremony would have been for all my family, for their sacrifices and struggles.

On May 10, the day of our prepandemic convocation, I woke up early, and curled my hair and put on makeup, staring into the same mirror I had before my high school prom. I got dressed in something other than a coffee-stained sweatshirt, and my mom took pictures to share on Facebook. The normalcy was interrupted by a 20 minute ceremony I watched on YouTube, nestled on the couch in-between my parents, while my youngest brother slept upstairs. And while the Alma Mater played, my collegiate years ended. Four years of headaches from late-night homework sessions on my computer and running to class because I slept through my alarm. I sat on that sand-colored couch and began to contemplate a future reconfigured, rearranged, and reimagined by a virus.