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Don’t get me wrong, commencement at St. John’s College was a beautiful event.  All those shy and awkward freshmen (myself included) that had signed the registrar at convocation four years before had now become good friends that I heartily cheered for as we received our diplomas.  Our speaker was refreshingly honest in his acceptance of the importance of struggle in our lives.  But at the end of the day, when the festivities were over, I went in my bedroom and cried.

Between the ceremony and the dark of evening, I attended St. John’s reception for graduates and their families, as well as a party my parents threw for me.  At those two events, many people, whom I love dearly, said these sorts of things: “Congratulations!  What a wonderful achievement!  You should be proud of all your accomplishments!  You’ve done it!”  All of which is appropriate and good to say.  But my immediate reaction, my overwhelming feeling was that I didn’t want to have done it – I wanted to be doing it still.  My family said that my four years at St. John’s had flown by astonishingly quickly, but it was exactly the opposite to me.  Those years had gone by so slowly, like the growth of a seed that you barely notice until it becomes a huge oak overshadowing the whole garden.  I don’t remember too well my life before I came to St. John’s.  This is the place where I grew up, the community of people (living and dead) among whom I took my place in the world.  And I realized after graduation that I was not ready to leave it.  The completion of my degree left a hole in heart that the piece of paper hanging on my wall could not make up for.  Of course, I plan to keep in touch with the friends I’ve made and the tutors that have mentored me, but that is not at all the same as living alongside those people day by day, reading the same books, sharing different ideas, and loving each one’s own kind of eccentricity.  Congratulations, yes.  A wonderful day, yes.  But also a day of sorrow and loss, a day of the grief that is birthed of love.