I will be away beginning Thursday, returning home to say goodbye to a dear soul. A young man not yet twenty-five, he ended a decade long fight with brain cancer. I remember him as a kid, as best friend become brother to my nephew, as a child's friend become son to my sister and brother-in-law, family to us all. He was remarkable in spirit, unyielding and noble rather than rightfully resentful and angry. He laughed often; humor was his armor. His life was claimed before he had the chance to really love, to raise a family and watch it grow, but not before he left an indelible mark on all who knew him. We are better for having known him, braver for having watched him fight a terrible destiny.
There are many kinds of loss in our life, but none so unrecoverable as death. Death is as much a part of life as is living, perhaps more so. It is the only certainty. We breathe for a while, a mighty pounding in our chest, but ultimately we will breathe no more, and the once great drum will silence. We move in and out of worlds, conserved in some form, but this form only once. Our own lives come and go, and we may pay no real notice. When those we love slip away, it is utterly devastating. Only time heals, and there is rarely time enough when we have truly loved another.
Most of us live long enough to lose someone close. The natural order of it all is that we lose first those we know least, the eldest among us, who depart in our childhoods. We know and love these people, but we don't know and love them as adults, and that is the tragedy. We are likely to say goodbye to others most especially in our thirties, when we are old enough to expect that grandparents and their generation will be called home. Eventually we say goodbye to our parents. Our hope is that we have lived and loved well enough to miss them without regret, without words left unsaid. Ultimately, we may say goodbye to spouses and close friends. We only pray we never have to say goodbye to a child.
One of the hardest conversations I ever had with my own children, when they were small, was the imminent passing of their beloved grandmother. Children feel at a very deep level, and they take their emotional queues from our unspoken words, from our attempts to hide sorrow. We are programmed to defend them, to preserve at all costs their innocence, to guard them from pain. Our children have every right to process, to question, to grieve. We must provide them space to do so, even as we attend to our own suffering in times of loss.
Sometimes, our children just need the opportunity to cry with us, even if they don't understand or feel the magnitude of a loss. As families, we are more than shared inheritance. We are bound in spirit, so many souls connected by emotional DNA, by tradition, by times shared, by the universe's most powerful force--love. A good family cry is cathartic, cleansing, freeing. It’s a validation of our humanity.
So, I leave soon to gather with family and friends. We follow the Irish tradition. We will cry, but we will laugh and celebrate a life too short, but well lived. Like all those who are truly loved, he is conserved, in our hearts and memories, permanently a part of our living and a testament to the very best that is within us all.
See you around campus.