Resilience defines these graduates

My friend Anne says do not compare. I will say that I am sad about something and that I shouldn’t be because what do I have to be sad about? Other people have bigger reasons to feel sad, and really I need to buck up, and count my blessings. Things could be worse.

And she will tell me this: Sad is sad. It is not a contest. Don’t measure it. Just acknowledge it.

And so I am going into this season of graduations and celebrations acknowledging this, feeling joy for all the seniors I know and don’t know, high school and college seniors, both. And feeling proud of them, too, because they have been through a lot, through frightening, unchartered times, and here it is, finally, their moment to shine. And it is a huge moment.

It is an earned moment.

But I am also acknowledging my sadness for these young people because there should have been dozens of moments like this, dozens of celebrations and award ceremonies and pats on the back and standing in the spotlight, goals scored and bows taken, first place, second place, third place, high school and college a succession of awards and accomplishments and small victories.

COVID stole a million American lives. We all know this and we mourn these losses. We read about people we don’t know and we grieve, still.

But COVID stole not only human life but human potential. It stole friendships and relationships that never began because people never met. It stole opportunities because theaters and stadiums and businesses, because all the places people gathered were shut down. COVID, for more than two years, was the only show in town. It stole the spotlight.

A few nights ago, I sat in the auditorium of Canton High School attending a Pops concert, which was magnificent on so many levels: A stage full of kids and you could see their faces finally, and they were beautiful faces. And these kids were talented, too, not just the ones who play instruments, but the ones whose voices are the instruments and had been muffled behind masks for so long. The audience was packed and cheering and it would have been, even in ordinary times, an extraordinary performance.

The director, Brian Thomas, said toward the end of the concert, that the seniors on stage had only two full years together. This was because COVID interrupted their sophomore and junior years. How were they able to learn what they learned? How were they able to work together and combine their talents and produce melodies and harmonies that sounded so effortless and seamless under such difficult circumstances?

A few days ago, I met a young woman who is graduating from the University of Delaware. Not once, but twice she had been scheduled to study abroad but this didn’t happen because of COVID. It might still happen though, she told me. Despite the fact that she will have already graduated, she got approved for a semester “So, maybe,” she said with a shrug and a smile.

Disappointment doesn’t seem to break these young people perhaps because they have grown used to it.

Plays. Concerts. Sports. The chance to compete. Birthdays. Dates. Hanging out. School trips. Gatherings of every kind. Two years and two months ago it began and it has yet to totally end. And though it isn’t a war raging in our back yards - though no one has had to spend a night in a bomb shelter, though our children haven’t had to trade in their schoolbooks for guns and go fight for their country, though they are not in any way suffering the way Ukraine’s youth are suffering - they have suffered.

Every young person accepting a diploma, walking or wheeling across some makeshift stage in cities and towns all over all this country, has suffered because COVID robbed them, many of them of people they loved, every one of them of experiences, opportunities and rituals that COVID stole.

Despite all this, maybe because of all this, they are resilient. And this weekend and next weekend, as one by one they are handed their diplomas, they will shine because they have come full circle, because at this rite of passage they are as they were at the start, together, a student body, the Class of 2022.