The Long Goodbye

Graduation and the thousand days of May

“This is the end,” our student council president said at Senior Chapel, the final chapel service of the year for our graduating class. He didn’t say it playfully or ironically. It was a statement of fact. All of our hard work, he continued, all of our late nights and early mornings, all of our papers and projects and tests—all of our time together, he said, is coming to a close.

Sitting in the bleachers with my wife and older son, who the weekend before had graduated from college, I felt sadness settle over me like a mist. I don’t like goodbyes, and the graduation season at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School is one long goodbye, a procession of lasts: last assignment, last class, last exam, last chapel, all leading to that walk across the graduation stage wearing funny robes and caps they will never wear again, taking their diplomas, and stepping off that stage into the future.

I’ve taught at Holy Innocents’, or HI, for thirty years. I’ve seen a lot of graduations and said goodbye to a lot of students. I’m not going to lie: it hurts. You invest all these hours into these teenagers, build relationships with them, experience highs and lows with them, celebrate their victories and commiserate with them on their losses. There are those magical moments when a student who has struggled with the subject matter finally gets it. Their entire face lights up like a sunrise, and you can see their relief and gratitude emanating off them like heat waves. Those are the emotional and spiritual paychecks that feed teachers’ souls.

And then, at some point after spring break, they start to withdraw, like a tide slowly retreating from the shore, leaving you stranded on the beach.

I love teaching, and I love working with teenagers. As frustrating as they can sometimes be, teenagers are literal works in progress. You can watch them change and grow almost like time-lapse photography of flowers blooming. And there isn’t anything much sweeter than the genuine smiles you get from your students.

Which is why it hurts when they leave. And I get it—they are supposed to leave. We want them to stand on their own two feet. The whole business of education is about helping them grow into knowledgeable, good people who will be productive members of society. It’s not really about us, the teachers.

But we are the ones left behind, continuously, year after year.

And that is why I’m so ambivalent about graduation season. It’s a time to celebrate and to reminisce, to shake hands and high-five and hug each other, to be happy for these young people headed off into bright futures.

But it hurts. It hurts and so I become part of that disengagement, that slow withdrawal, even though I know it doesn’t help, that trying to wall off that feeling of sadness only prolongs it or makes you a little more cynical, a little less the person you were that made students want to take your class and connect with you.

At HI we refer to this time of year as “the thousand days of May,” because every day brings some altered schedule, some new ceremony or event, some additional celebration of the senior class that reminds us that this time is ending.

But this year is especially fraught: my youngest son is a member of this year’s graduating class. As a teacher at HI, I get to hand him his diploma. I’m hoping I can keep the tears in until afterwards.

He’s feeling it, too. The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of graduation parties and get-togethers. Earlier this year, he said he couldn’t wait to be done with high school, to get out of this place. Now he and his friends and classmates are constantly hanging out together. I won’t say they are clinging to each other, because that would imply a level of desperation, and that’s not what it is. I think it’s that the more they are together in their friend groups, the more they can prolong their goodbyes.

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Literally as I was writing this, just before I began this paragraph, a student, Jack, walked in to my office. Jack is a junior who took my senior AP English Lit class this year.¹ The seniors in the class welcomed him, sometimes gently joked with him about being a junior, but wholly accepted him, and he held his own with them in class discussions and project work. At HI, students wear uniform polo shirts; grades nine through eleven wear either white or black shirts, while seniors wear crimson polos. Last week our seniors had their final day of high school classes, and this week the juniors get to wear their crimson polos for the first time. So when Jack came to check in with me, he was wearing his new crimson polo.

“Where are you going to be this period?” I asked. Even though senior classes are over, grades nine through eleven still have classes with their own exams next week after graduation, so Jack has to check in with me during our scheduled class meeting to let me know where he will be.

“Probably in the commons,” he said. “Well, the new commons.” He meant the senior commons, which the current juniors have already taken over.

I smiled. “The shirt looks good,” I said. “How’s it feel?”

He smiled back, but ruefully. “I don’t like it,” he said, and in those four words he summed up exactly what I’m writing about here—change, endings, goodbyes.

We talked a little about what English class he will take next year. Then he stuck out his hand. “I’ve enjoyed being in your class,” he said. “Thank you.”

I wasn’t expecting it, even though this is Jack’s last day of classes before exams. I was touched by it. I shook his hand. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed teaching you.” And with a nod and a smile, he ducked out. I’ll see Jack next year, in the hallway or at lunch, and we’ll smile and nod at each other. It’s not goodbye, not like with the graduating seniors. But it’s another ending.

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There are students I loved teaching—students with whom I built a strong rapport, a real connection—whom I have not seen since they graduated, in some cases decades ago. Occasionally I hear what they are up to or see a social media post, and there are mutual promises of getting together, of catching up over a cup of coffee or lunch. Most of these get-togethers don’t happen. Life is busy, schedules don’t match up, etc. And to be honest, part of me is afraid that if we do meet up, it will be awkward, trying to resurrect a relationship that was built on shared experiences and events and a student-teacher dynamic that ended years ago.

Which is stupid, because the few times I have gotten together with former students, we’ve had a delightful time. I actually work with a handful of former students who have become peers and friends. And this year I taught the daughter of a colleague and an alumna who I coached in soccer. Time might be a thief, but it is also a wheel.

My son isn’t disappearing after graduation. Next week, his mother and I will go with him to Auburn for an orientation meeting and registration for fall classes, and then we will go to Hilton Head for a week, and for the rest of this summer he will live at home and work. He will depart for Auburn in August, and his mother and I will miss him terribly, but he is ready to launch on his own, and so are we.

What makes all of this poignant goodbyeing bearable, even celebratory, is what our student council president said near the end of his Senior Chapel speech. The end, he said, is what made him realize how much his memories of his time here have meant to him, how they have shaped him and made him the person he is. And he is profoundly grateful for those memories and those moments.

You could feel this student’s genuine love for his classmates and this school. It was moving in just the right way. It reminded me of the following profound quote: “But what is grief, if not love persevering?”² And it’s yet another example of how my students teach me as much as I teach them. Grief hurts. But it comes from a place of love. It’s a reminder of that love, of what we have lost, but also of what we had, and what we still have in our memory, if we choose to hold on to it.

I’ll hold on to that as I watch my son put on his graduation robes. I’ll smile through the tears as he walks toward me across that stage so I can hand him his diploma and give him a bear hug. And I’ll cherish all the goodbyes because, to quote Tennyson, “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”³

1. He transferred to Holy Innocents’ the previous year, having already taken the American lit English courses we offer to juniors, so he needed to take a senior-level course this year.

2. Stated by Vision in WandaVision (Episode Eight, 26 February 2021).

3. From Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1850 elegy In Memoriam A.H.H., Canto 27, lines 15-16.