Today feels like when the biopsy results arrive at the doctor’s office, and someone picks up the phone to deliver news in a bedside manner, but with distance sufficient to walk away untroubled after terminating the call.  

I’m a sixty-seven-year-old professor at a small university driving to graduation, a ceremony faculty suffer through. Grads, too, until the glorious moment they cross the stage. Graduation requires creativity during COVID. We were going to do it drive-by, but drenching April rain predicted this Saturday morning means we need a Plan B. We, the faculty, dressed in our regalia, masked and socially-distanced, will form a line in the halls of the main building. One-by-one, each student, accompanied by invited family members, will parade past as we cheer. It’s different in another way, too. It’s my first graduation ceremony since the University decided to terminate my college, including both the program and department I teach in. And perhaps my last.

I think about this when I arrive early, before the rain. The lot where I’ve parked for twenty-five years feels the same, except it doesn’t feel like it’s mine anymore. I turn off the ignition, mask up, get out of the car. The day is gray all around, but in the southwest sky clouds bunched together are moving slowly toward campus. I grab my black gown with three purple stripes on the arms, cape, and tam, and carry them across the parking lot, searching right and left for faces, wondering if those faces will still feel familiar. 

I travel downstairs to the faculty office. During the past year of teaching virtually, I’ve been here only a few times. The lights are on, but all the cubicles are empty. I’ll continue teaching out the program for several more months, so technically it’s still my office. I feel like a ghost lingering in the house where I died. I hurriedly slip into my gown as if, at any moment, someone might bust in and challenge my right to be here. I fasten my cape so the purple and yellow face out. 

I join other faculty upstairs to receive instructions for this ad hoc ceremony that only a fraction of graduates will attend. My colleagues mill about like exotic birds in black gowns caped and striped in Bright Gold, Kelly Green, Violet, or Royal Blue. I know many of them well, but because we’ve been teaching virtually during COVID, it’s been a while since I’ve seen them in the flesh. 

Everyone makes a point to greet me. As we exchange greetings, I study their faces to see how I am reflected, look for averted eyes. I’m being let go. I no longer smell like the other cows in the herd. To dwell on this fact creates unresolvable awkwardness for others, asks for something not within their power to give. My boss, a good guy not involved in the decision to euthanize my program, says “You look mighty sharp in your regalia.” I’m a wound to be bandaged, a leper to be kissed.   

We sit in chairs arranged six-feet apart along the hallway. Stephanie strides back and forth like a lead singer in a rock band, bouncing on her toes, both cheerleader and drill sergeant.

“Each grad will check in one at a time. They’ll march down this hall with their guests. Hold up your signs and cheer.” She points to signs stacked against the wall, professionally-produced, brightly-colored, that read Congratulations! or You Did It!

“We want to make this special for them, right? We have pompoms too!” She’s not kidding. She makes us practice cheering and shaking pompoms. We do a dry run with a couple of school employees pretending to be students marching in. “You can do better than that!” she shouts. “Louder!” I’m impressed by the force of her will, her implacable enthusiasm that will prevail over all of us. 

Because of COVID, there’s no designated gathering of all graduates. Instead, they’ll drop by whenever they like during a two-hour period, with only a single student and his or her family allowed in the lobby at a time. It’s early, so I join conversations in progress, moving from circle to circle, listening, taking a pulse. My department is not the first to be taught out and may not be the last. I can tell one department chair in particular worries that hers will be next. I know this not because of anything she says, but because of the disquiet she emits in every word and move.  

The first student arrives, and Stephanie gives us a heads up to grab our signs. Employees in Admissions set an example, cheering and congratulating, but they’re used to manufacturing zeal—it’s part of their job description. When the faculty joins in, however, it sounds like we’re being forced to sing at a concentration camp. But that changes for me when I focus on the graduate coming towards me, the shine on her face, a floodlight illuminating the whole hall. For her, this cheesy graduation ceremony is real, and her reality is bigger than my self-pity, so I give it up, and I hear my cheers for her echo from a place deep inside me.

For a while, a succession of students parade by at intervals of three to five minutes, most with at least one family member, some with a sizable entourage. I’m interested in all of them and speculate about their lives as they walk by. Particularly striking is the fortyish woman in cap and gown trailed by a little boy and a little girl wearing T-shirts that read Mommy Graduated,  with a pair of teenagers and a husband bringing up the rear.  

Then we hit a dry spell, no grads in the queue, and conversation circles form again. A colleague who is a fellow gardener shows me pictures of his father’s container garden and lettuce sets he’s grown from seed the way women show pictures of their grandkids. Another colleague reminisces about prior graduations conducted in a megachurch in Louisville and things we thought up to pass the time. One professor created a bingo card with squares like “stiletto heels,” “Tennis shoes” “Family screams inappropriately” and as grads came to the stage, faculty players marked off squares until someone got bingo. My colleague says, “I was telling Dave about how you used to bring crosswords you hid inside the graduation program.” His story reminds me how long I’ve known and been known by these folks, something I took for granted that soon will not be part of what defines me.

“We were smart to move graduation inside,” someone says. “Now it’s pouring!”

I find a classroom door with a window and peer through it. I see blossoms on trees shaking from the impact of raindrops. I imagine myself out there, underneath a tree, surrounded by rain and smelling spring. I feel soothed, cleansed.  

We get another heads up, and the parades resume. I get a contact high from the positivity and pride of the grads and their families. My favorite is a young man barely old enough to drive, followed by nine family members that span three, maybe four, generations, from toddlers holding hands to an old man with a cane and a limp. All of them are giddy. 

Noon is the deadline, so at about 12:15 we are released. Graduation is over. Students have stepped across the line into the future that awaits them, a future swollen with possibility. Our cheerleader/drill sergeant collects the signs and pompoms. My colleagues head for the doors with their own futures in their pockets, not the boundless future of youth, but futures in which, for now, they have jobs.  

My future is retirement. That’s okay. I’m tired of working, I’m old enough to draw Social Security, and my wife and I have 401-Ks. But as I step across the line between what was and what will be, my future is formless. Retirement is defined by what is not—not working, not earning, not mattering. Hallmark cards and Senior Centers don’t change that—they reinforce it.

I return to the faculty office, remove and hang my regalia on my coat hanger, and leave, crossing the parking lot by myself. The rain is over. The air is still heavy with moisture, but the sun is lurking behind the clouds. Nature’s future is green. I press my Toyota fob and hear the click of unlocking. I toss my clothes in the back, slide into the driver’s seat, insert the key, and twist right. 

The engine turns over. 

Inexplicably, I’m surprised. My surprise is an opening instantly filled with power surging from my feet to my head, as it occurs to me that I’m being released from a comfortable prison. I’m free, now, free to create a new world of my own. Sunlight, breaking through pompom clouds in the west, whispers Congratulations. You did it.