This morning reading the NYTimes I was drawn to an article I found deeply touching about HS principals responding in unusual and lovely ways to their graduating seniors in the face of canceled graduation ceremonies, proms which will not be happening, and an uncertain future ahead of them. “The absolute most important thing is that they know that they’re cared about,” said a principal in Texas who drove 800 miles to visit each of his school’s 612 graduating seniors, taking a selfie with each grinning, surprised student. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-high-school-principals.html)
There are countless principals, teachers, parents, siblings, friends, grandparents wondering how to respond to this conundrum, how to help young people mark a life achievement in the altered universe in which we now are living. Each will come up with their own ways to celebrate, like the young couple who are near neighbors of ours who we saw the other day all dressed up and getting into their car - where were they headed? “We’re going to a drive-by wedding celebration,” they said excitedly and off they drove.
Whatever the creative solution people find, one special rabbi I know, Laura Bellows, beautifully articulates below the loss and the sorrow. I think we need to grieve and acknowledge loss before we can move on.
My people
My people are bored, resigned, restless, resilient.
They are charting maps of the rabbit holes of uncertainty,
air quality, isolation curves, climate crises, cute cat videos.
And perhaps also the emails from camp cancelling
their long-awaited Israel trip, emails cancelling the prom,
pranks, commencement, fill-in-the-blank cancelled.
They are tired of their parents, tired of school, dreaming of
hugging their best friend whose girlfriend just died. Yes,
their age. Yes, just one of many losses these days.
Oh to long, to be nostalgic together, to remember and resolve,
to experience the sweet relapse of memories, shared as we sit
squeezing hands in commencement rows, glance back
at our parents, and say bittersweetly that now, at last,
and with equal doses relief and anxiety, we let go
our high school selves and step forward. Instead, I see
my people, my high school seniors crying, stressed, restless,
zombied by screen time and trying to just. show. up.
Without their best friend’s hand; stepping into their own
parents’ kitchens (the ones they were supposed to have left)
again and again. When does it come? a step, forward?
When does the worry and longing end, when does excitement,
deep bellied butterfly excitement, begin?
Show me your grief and we will try to laugh together
through the losses. This is no oppression Olympics –
this is a deep communal cry, a communal prayer for all
left incomplete, undefined, unrealized, and for entering
the kitchen each morning instead of the next chapter
of one’s dreams.
Are you yourself poised on the brink of a new life’s chapter? Are you able to express your feelings about this? How does this poem speak to you? Have you and your friends found things to do that help? What is your fantasy of being treated “royally” that is possible in this moment?
Perhaps you have a loved one graduating from high school or college - are you able to talk across generations about the tensions and pain and disappointment? Of course you cannot fete them in all the traditional usual ways, but how can you celebrate them in the here and now?
Rabbi Laura Bellows is the Director of Prozdor and Teen Learning at Hebrew College and, among her other creative endeavors, is currently designing an online graduation ceremony with her teens.