Class of COVID-19

Tim Woodcock writes: When this pandemic is over – and the death tolls have been tallied, the data crunched and the policies critiqued, and the most incompetent politicians booted from office – only then we will be able to clearly assess the psychological damage it has taken on people. One aspect of this that has been on my mind recently is the way traditional rites of passages have been disrupted.

We are already becoming used to births, deaths, and marriages being marked in creative but perhaps not entirely satisfactory ways. While I imagine a birth is much the same mix of chaos and joy for the parents as it has always been, will extended families members be willing to forgo the experience of cooing at a newborn and passing him or her from person to person? And if they do skip that, will the bond created be any less deep? Concepts like a “virtual funeral” – which was almost meaningless six months ago – are starting to take form and become commonplace. But does a virtual funeral offer the same sense of closure and opportunity for grieving as a regular funeral? Time will tell. And will we have a summer season of pared-down weddings, or no summer season of weddings at all?

A lesser rite of passage, but one that is more tied up with my own life right now, is the high school graduation ceremony. I teach at Priory, a 7-12 Catholic boys’ school and this year that the cohort of 8^th graders who I taught in my first year at the school – and therefore a group that has a special affection for - are the graduating seniors. The graduation ceremony normally scheduled for late May has been tentatively rescheduled for late July and will need to be reformulated to conform to social distancing guidelines. Many schools have opted for drive-by ceremonies and handing out yard signs offering their congratulations. Creative, yes. Entirely satisfactory? I don’t know – ask a senior.

In my recent conversations with seniors (with whom I interact in the context of the school newspaper), two themes emerge: adaptability and anticlimax.

They know they will get through it; they’ll make this less-than-ideal situation work, even if means wrapping up this stage of their schooling with a sequence of Zoom meetings, as well as being forced to make a decision about college without the benefit of a second visit to campus. These kids are both robust and flexible.

Yet there is a niggling sense of anticlimax – where is the reward for the six years of hard work? How do you truly celebrate with your friends in a time of social distancing? Do you view a graduation ceremony as merely icing on the cake at the end of a school year that is already over or is it the symbolic culmination of it?

As you might expect, students are embracing the anomaly of making this transition in this very strange time. It’s a year that everyone will remember decades from now. There are T-shirts online available for not “Class of 2020” but “Class of COVID-19”; there are others that say, “I survived both ‘Senioritis’ and ‘Coronavirus.’”

I suppose things can be unforgettable in more ways than one.