GUEST COLUMN: Saying Goodbye

One friend, perhaps my closest in the senior class, passed by on the other side of the walk oblivious to my calls. He passed by me and disappeared into a sea of bobbing black caps, and a sense of overwhelming despair came over me as I realized that I would probably never see him again. My first instinct was to run after him, but the path was too thin and the people too thick I stood there a few seconds contemplating the thought of never seeing my friend again. Eventually, my thoughts wandered to all of the people that I had met this year that I would never see again. At first I was overwhelmed. My mind was a blur of people from my past that I had known and forgotten. Hundreds of people that I couldn't remember, people that had lived their own life and forgotten me just as I had forgotten them. That night I lay awake in bed, wondering how so many people that I was once familiar with could simply vanish, disappear into nothing as if they were never there at all. What purpose does it serve to know so many and remember so few? Perhaps all of the friends that we make and the enemies we challenge add something to our lives. Maybe the lessons we learn and the relationships that we have with these people are the bricks that form our personality. Some of the people with whom you cross paths will contribute nothing to your life. These people may be forgotten most easily, usually without remorse, however those that do contribute to you as a person will never be forgotten. They become a part of you, a part that will never leave and which cannot be forgotten. Two weeks after that graduation, I received a call from my mother telling me my grandfather had died. I was supposed to go up to see him in his nursing home four days later. My life had been so busy that I had not gotten up to New Hampshire to see him in six months or so. My mother always told me that he had asked about me, which made me feel even worse about not being able to say goodbye. I felt the same sensation then as I had when I saw my friend walk by me on Locust Walk two weeks before. There is something so final about death that makes it very tough to deal with or think about. Even though I knew that I would never see my friend again, I still knew that if I decided to find out which city he was moving to and look him up, I would see his name on the pages between my fingers; I would never again find my grandfather's. My mother once told me that no one ever dies because they always live on in others memories. Others have claimed that as long as you have kids (and they have kids, and they have kids?etc.) you can never die because you live in your children. In fact, society has forever busied itself providing us explanations of why no one ever really dies. To admit this would be to acknowledge our mortality, and no one wants to do that. Grappling with these ideas I have come to the conclusion that the end is very probably the end, and that the only way that we "live on" is in the stomachs of the worms that recycle our borrowed bodies. However, I also believe that we do learn and grow from experience gained from the people that we interact with the people we love, the people we hate, the panhandlers in front of Wawa?you get the idea. At the end of our complex, busy, hectic lives we are patchwork quilts, pieced together from the virtues that we choose to acquire from those we admire, and lacking the traits that we see in others and choose to avoid. I will never forget my grandfather as the kind, diligent, fun loving fair, gentle man that I once knew, but even more than that, he is a piece of the quilt that judges my thoughts and rules my actions. Although I would give the world to see one last mischievous grin or to listen to one more of his stories, I do not feel the need to chase down the path after him because what was most important between us has already become a part of me. The same is true of those we leave at college. Although we might not get the chance to say goodbye, even to those very close to us, a piece of them will never leave.