Graduation. Say the word and I’m instantly uncomfortable. I’m wearing a hideously ugly and ill-fitting dress (eighth grade, high school), or I’m sweltering in a rented cap and gown (college), or one of my children is the graduate sweltering in the cap and gown. We’re in a gym with rows and rows of folding chairs or on an open field with rows and rows of folding chairs. The sun is beating down, or else it’s raining. Somebody plays a musical instrument. Somebody makes a speech about how the graduates hold the future in their hands, and how they have a great and serious responsibility, and how they are graduating at a time of unprecedented challenges but also unbounded opportunity.
Diplomas are handed out — at the beginning, people clap enthusiastically for each individual graduate, but this gets tired quickly so by the time we’ve reached the G’s and H’s there’s just a polite little clap-clap-clap, except for every now and then when some family sends up a roar of cheers for their graduate, which then shames the audience into sending up a roar for the next few graduates before we all settle back down into tepid, tired, cursory applause, punctuated by the occasional localized “Woo!” and whistle.
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If I’m the one graduating, I shuffle across the stage, accept the diploma, shake the hand, and stumble off again. If my child is the graduate, I wait eagerly for his name to be read aloud, and finally it is, but it’s mispronounced. A photographer takes a picture of each graduate receiving a diploma; a month or two later our son’s photo arrives in the mail, and it’s a very nice photo except that it is not a photo of our son, it’s of some other kid.
And that, dear members of the class of 2020, is what you are missing. Or, to look at it another way, that is what you have been spared.
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And what will you be getting instead? Well, there’s never been a graduation season like this one. This year’s graduations, by not happening or by happening virtually, have a chance to actually be meaningful and memorable. Everyone is talking to you. Everyone is thinking of you, and taking you seriously. You can sit on your couch and listen to graduation speeches by Barack and Michelle Obama and Oprah and Lady Gaga and Anna Wintour and Beyoncé and John Waters and Awkwafina and Simone Biles and Bill and Melinda Gates, just to name a few. All these people will be addressing you with sympathy and concern and respect, in recognition of this very strange and frightening time you’re graduating in. If somebody plays a musical instrument, it’ll probably be Yo Yo Ma.
You might find that talking online about all this with your classmates turns out to be a much more intense and genuine shared experience than the usual graduation day, with its marching and milling around and frantically trying to find your friends in the crowd, and its final is-that-all-there-is? feeling of anticlimax and letdown.
If this year’s weird online, non-graduation graduations have a kind of emotional power and directness that no ordinary generic caps-and-gowns ceremony could match, they are also a reminder that even in good times, ceremonies are only symbols of life’s big experiences. Graduations are like weddings. They matter, sure, but the things they symbolize — an education, a marriage — matter a lot more.
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So congratulations, 2020 graduates. And as you venture forth —
But never mind. Let’s just say that I envy you for not having had to show up, sit for hours on a folding chair, and listen to stuff like that.
Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe.