Bereavement

There are certain events that make the act of leaving deliberate: the submission of theses, Senior Week, LDOC, Beer Trucks. These are the rituals that gently remind us that it is nearly time to go.

But the partings that should slip by unnoticed—the ones that lack a place in my path toward coping—are the ones that have made me most sad. There is no sense, for example, in longing for my tiny, un-airconditioned dorm room in Alspaugh. But in recalling my first days here, I have been forced to confront the fact that I may never see it again. It is silly to cherish the last toffee cookie from Saladelia that I will consume, but I am already rather fond of the idea of it. (I should note that I possess no similar feelings over Shooters; I have laid any desire to go there to rest.)

I have already mapped out my Friday plans to ensure that I will be within earshot of the carillon singing “Dear Old Duke,” but I am pierced passing the tower of the Chapel. Its beauty is deflating, a reminder that the icon casts a shadow over my path only temporarily. I admit that I climbed the Chapel steps for the symbolism of the act. Even now, perhaps the last time my name will appear in these pages, I find myself eulogizing my Duke experience rather than celebrating it.

But by making these things overly commemorative, I strip them of joy. In this way, my nostalgia takes the form of grief. It is messy, tearful, uncomfortable. In a few days, I will pick up my cap and gown, which seems to me much like a habit of mourning.

I have observed in myself a tendency to push away those things I suspect I will miss most, fearing their abandonment. This way, I cope. Time with friends and old acquaintances must be measured against nights spent pressed up against the masses, weighted further still against the eerie silence of a night spent in Perkins for a suddenly-important paper.

While I approach the denouement of my formal education with every measure of sadness, my brother, a freshman at N.C. State, provides a study in contrasts. He recounts for me the anxiety of attending one’s first themed college party (which for him was “Jersey Shore”) and the excitement over choosing a major (I switched three times, until I settled somewhat anticlimactically on English).

He reminds me that there is a better way to celebrate memory, one that isn’t dependent on symbolism or photographs or preserving flimsy retellings in newsprint. He cherishes them, but not because they are novel or ephemeral. Neither does he require a ritual for separation or a language of missing to explain why they were important. He does not need these things to help him let go.

The bereaved need stages, and words, an issue the poet and writer Meghan O’Rourke has explored in her essays on grief. But I realize, perhaps too late—it’s always too late—that I need not mourn. I am slowly converting to a way to say goodbye that is mindful of the reasons leaving has saddened me.