In A Pre-COVID-19 World, This Would Be Graduation Day

When we made it through the fires of October and returned to campus in January for the start of the spring semester, who knew it would end like this?  Today we would have graduated our seniors and sent them off to the world as newly minted college graduates.  They would have assembled at the historic Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in their caps and gowns, paraded down the main aisle to their seats only to be called, one by one, to the stage for a picture with our college president and a handshake in front of a full house of family, loved ones and friends.

Instead, the Shrine is dark today and our graduates are recuperating from final exams, pondering their next move in the crazy world turned upside down by, of all things, a virus.

As I checked in with students in the weeks before final exams, I heard the stories:  no internet access, both parents out of work, no means of financial support, no place to study away from televisions and family members and the normal hustle and bustle of life in a small house or apartment.  Most of my students who had jobs were furloughed when the stay-at-home orders went into effect unless they were deemed essential businesses, like fast food restaurants.  If they were essential, they had to keep going to work, keep risking exposure, keep trying to maintain social distancing in gloves and masks behind plexiglass shields.

Quite often, I also heard how they were having trouble concentrating, focusing their attention, studying difficult concepts, attending online classes, taking online tests, staying in close contact with their professors who were themselves struggling with this new educational distance paradigm.  Students could not sleep for the anxiety; could not eat or fell into stress eating to cope with the uncertainties.

The worse thing about this is there is no clear ending.  With the fire, when the LAFD and the school administration determined that the campus was ready for us to return and was fully safe for everyone, we set a date and showed up ready to put everything in place and clean away the last of the dirt and ash left behind by the cleaning crew.  Now, we have no idea when we will be back.  Summer classes will be online, that much we know, but beyond that, we are still in evaluation mode.  A lot will be dictated by our governor and mayor.  We know we want everyone to be safe, again, and to feel safe on campus.  But the trouble with an invisible virus, there is no expiration date, no time when the storm has passed, no absolute point where the threat is one hundred percent neutralized.  There is talk of second waves, of new outbreaks—enough already!

Graduation, like many milestones in our lives, is a death.  The undergraduate who climbed the hill to the campus four years ago was an entirely different person, like a caterpillar entering the chrysalis stage.  Now, just 1,460 days later, the caterpillar has emerged as the butterfly.  One must die so the other can be born.  This year the rebirth is muted, off stage, less public.  The last final is turned in and now thoughts turn back to coronavirus and the future, and what might be coming next.

The college hopes to hold graduation in August, should fate and the virus allow.  It will be great to see all of our seniors again in the weeks before they head off to the rest of their lives.  We hope the virus allows us to say goodbye, to gather together one last time.

Until then, the world is moving rapidly toward summer, despite the snow in parts of the United States.  That is just one more anomaly in a year of anomalies.  When I speak with freshmen, I tell them this year was an aberration.  A fire, a virus?  I am keeping lookout for frogs and locusts.  These are unprecedented times, I tell them.  We are in new territory here, but this is what it is like to live through history; this is what is meant by “if the fates allow,” in that song we sang at Christmas, which seems a lifetime ago now.

One evening in January, as I was leaving campus to go home, I stopped off at our chapel on the hill.  The air was crisp and clean, and inside, there was warmth from the softly purring heaters.  I took a seat in the shadows and let the warmth and nostalgia flow over me.  There, I could commune with the generations of students who had flowed through the school over the last 95 years.  World wars, threats of nuclear holocaust, marches, prayer ceremonies, untimely deaths, early births, growing families, dreams deferred, dreams realized—the entire mixed bag of human existence:  all there, all ghosts and images, sound and fury.  Only, I knew, it always means something.  It signifies everything.

We are human.  We are strong.  We continue to live in a brave new world, and like all the brave new worlds of the past, we will bear witness.  We will survive.  We will thrive.  We will go on.

Today is graduation day.  Now to the future.