The Graduation Song
‘‘(Pomp & Circumstance) manages to sound triumphant and nostalgic in equal measure, making it perfect for a ceremony that marks the end of one era and the beginning of a new stage of life.”
One morning in early February, I woke to the sound a full orchestra playing Pomp & Circumstance in my head. This was strange. I did not like having such an endlessly droning song being the first thing to enter my consciousness. As a general rule, I do not listen to Pomp & Circumstance unless it is required of me as a cooperative member of society during a solemn ceremony. “This will probably pass,” I thought as I swung my legs out of bed and prepared to put it right out of my mind.
It did not pass.
In fact, it so much did not pass that after several days of the song intermittently popping into my head at the most inopportune moments, I finally shared with Drew the superbly annoying reality of my interior world. I hoped that talking about this bizarre experience out loud would make it go away, but there was no such luck. Having a song in my head that I occasionally sing aloud is nothing new. I even have a Spotify playlist of songs that are in my head upon waking because these songs typically reveal something to me of what I am deeply feeling, fearing, or thinking in a similar way that dreams unveil the unconscious. Pomp & Circumstance did not make that playlist. It felt like something that had come upon me rather than flowing from within me, and it just didn’t make sense.
After nearly a month, I was beginning to accept Pomp & Circumstance as an unwelcome yet manageable part of my daily life. Then my grandmother’s health began to fail. By early March I was sitting at her bedside in North Carolina, learning to say goodbye to a woman who prayed and sang and laughed me through much of my life. Within less than a week of entering the hospital, she was gone.
The day she died, my loud and large and utterly lovable family were squeezed together around my grandparents’ kitchen table, each of us smiling with the goodness of being together after several years apart but quietly aching with longing for Grandma to be there to see it, knowing how happy it would make her. We asked my Grandpa to tell us again the stories we cherish about their life together:
“When I walked into the dance hall that evening, a beautiful woman on stage was singing, ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’ with a live band. I turned to my friend and said, ‘I’m going to marry her someday,’ and I did. . .”
“On our wedding day, a homeless man in our town walked into the banquet hall and placed a crumpled dollar bill on the table as a wedding gift for Mary. She was always kind to him, and it was all he had. I wish I had framed that dollar bill. . .”
“She always had a smile and a kiss for me when I got home from work. . .“
Then my aunts and uncles began to chime in with their own memories:
“Every night, Mom would sit at the bottom of the stairs and sing all six of us kids to sleep. . .”
“Remember how Mom would always clean the house before the cleaning lady arrived?. . .”
“She added ‘Darling’ to each of our names when calling us in for supper. . .”
These are the memories that compose our lives, ones we don’t realize we’re living until they’ve passed. It is then that we need them. Even as I write, I know the memory of my family sitting around the kitchen table in our grief, re-membering each other with stories from our family’s history, will be a story that I build my life on—one I will tell my own children someday. All of these stories recalled my grandmother to life, and isn’t that the goodness and power of the spoken word? The God who spoke Creation into being was with us in our storytelling, too—weaving new memories out of words and presence, grief and love. There is one memory from that night that has lingered with me since, asking for my attention. The mystery of it is something I haven’t wanted to try put into words, until now.
During a quiet lull in our conversation, my uncle looked up from his folded hands and said,
“When I was a kid and someone in our community died, Mom would always describe it to me like this: ‘They graduated and went to Heaven.’ She thought of death as a graduation, and I’ve never forgotten that.”
Oh. This was why. A month’s worth of Pomp & Circumstance had been pointing to that moment with my uncle at the kitchen table on the evening my grandmother graduated from one life to the next. There are moments in our lives that reveal to us how much we did not know we knew. “Surely, the Lord was in this place though I did not know it!” said the patriarch Jacob upon waking from a dream of angels. It is moments such as these that tell me the truest, deepest reality is not something that can be seen. Yet we are invited to seek it nonetheless.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:18)
In my last phone conversation with my grandma, she spoke of heaven. Some of her final words to me were, “One day, we’ll all be together and sing and rejoice and glorify God forever!” I laughingly said something like, “Grandma, you’ve got a lot of time left!” but something in me knew that this could be the last time, simply because of how much eternity crept into our conversation that afternoon. Looking back, I know she knew with a knowledge that goes deeper than logic or words that she did not have much time left. She was graciously preparing me for her graduation. For her, and for all of us who carry the hope of Heaven here on earth, death is no end at all. It is merely the graduation song that marks the end and beginning of a long and beautiful life.