The end of a school year is always bittersweet. While students and teachers alike welcome the idea of a break from routine, studying or marking, and packing lunches, school years are filled with endings as well. Students graduate, families move, and teachers transfer. Time passes quickly, and nothing – and no one – will ever be exactly the same way again.
This year’s school year finds our third child graduating from high school. It is wonderfully exciting to see some of her dreams come to fruition. It is likewise sad to know that she won’t have another high school music night or basketball tournament. It is sobering to realize that families we’re only just starting to see again after two years of COVID restrictions will no longer gather at the school for meetings or celebrations.
Our daughter and the young women on the softball team that has been a huge part of her life for eight years will go their separate ways at the end of July. While many of them will continue to play their sport, the “family” we have created with this team will no longer carpool, travel to tournaments, or chat on the sidelines. Newly free time each week comes at the cost of unfillable holes in our hearts.
At my school, several staff members are moving or transferring to exciting new positions in other schools. While I am happy for each of them, passing these people in the hallways, I just cannot fathom that they won’t be there in September when the rest of us return. We are known more for who we are than for what we do and, while I respect their contributions to our school as professionals, I truly value the gifts they have brought to me personally. New people can be hired to do a job, but no one can replace the unique sense of compassion in a heart. No one can replace a person’s inner energy or sense of humour. While there may be good listeners and confidants in my life, no one will replace the individuals who are moving on.
Coupled with fatigue from the endless to-do lists of this time of year, the reality of these changes tends to hit me in waves of melancholy. In our Sunday readings, Jesus encouraged those who followed him to let go of the past. They were instructed to look forward and to continue to live their missions on earth with their sights set on heaven. Even those who had loved ones to bury or family to say goodbye to were told, “No one who sets a hand to the plough and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God” (Lk 9:62). To follow him, we must keep our eyes forward.
In this reading, I don’t believe that Jesus is telling us to become hardened, but to keep moving ahead and moving towards him, to keep spreading love and the good news, rather than dwelling on what has passed. While I may shed some tears over the changes I’m experiencing right now, I know that strong emotions simply mean that my life has been changed for the better by the experiences and people who have touched my life along the way.
These years are now parts of my personal foundation. Nothing is stopping me from remembering the beauty, and nothing will stop me from praying for the people who have helped to build me up in the most recent stage of my journey.
With gratitude, hope, and a few tissues, I face the changes on the horizon, and I pray that my colleagues, my daughter, and her fellow graduates can do the same.
May we all remember the wise words of Winnie the Pooh, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” (A.A. Milne).
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