I've always hated graduation. Long speeches delaying the gratification of hearing a name called, listening to stilted speeches. I could do without them. But under the clear sky and blazing Saturday sun I watched a handful of the kids I work with graduate. And I watched them with enthusiasm and joy and a smattering of proud tears.
There is a reason I have a renewed
fondness for graduation.
Last week we lost someone. Lost is
the wrong sentiment. He was taken. He was murdered. It wasn’t peaceful. It
wasn’t his time to go.
If you measure death in the number of headlines, the number
of stranger-attended memorials, then his death was quiet. Weighed in reporters
and his death seems undeserving of spectacle and broadcast grieving. His death
does not evoke the wrenching of hands about gun legislation or discussions
about how mental health did or did not play a role. If you measure his death in
the 8 inches of newsprint space he shared with another lost life and two others
shot and injured over the weekend, if you measured it like that, you could miss
it.
But that is a
dangerous way to measure death.
His death will not warrant news stories beyond the weekend
laundry list of shootings that already ran. Journalists will not travel to his
home to ask people to share their favorite stories of him as son, or boyfriend,
or father. No politicians will lament the loss of an innocent victim.
But I remember him.
In the wake of his death, graduation
was exactly right. The jubilation. The wider world just a few waiting steps
away. And these students are ready for it; so eager for their “what next”. And
these kids have one. They have a next thing. They could have college and jobs
and marriage and kids. They have possibilities. They have nothing less than
today. They already know, too well, tomorrow is not guaranteed them.
The purple and white robes look new under the glare of the sun. The kids look jubilant the crowd ecstatic. And we need this. I need this brief celebration of as it is supposed to be.
