Last Year's Club

 Last Year’s Club

Last August I joined a new club. It was challenging, but as accompanies challenge, incredibly rewarding. We had inside jokes, secret signals, songs we’d sing to each other, nicknames, and identities. There was the resident “gato” whose job it was to catch and release any unwanted bugs. There was the loud member, waking us up when things got boring. The dancer, the organizer, and the one who walked in late every day with a sneaky smile that said “I know, right, a pleasure to see me?” 

It was such a close-knit club that at times it felt like a cult, or a family. Sadly, the community I was part of day in and day out has since disbanded, and it is permanent. There will be no more meetings. We will never celebrate together again, never be caught by surprise by earthquakes or fart noises. We won’t have each other to lean on or bicker with. There won’t even really be a way for us members to contact each other, we just sort of said “bye”. We knew it would end, but it was still chaotic. We scatter in different directions.

Why doesn’t anyone talk about that aspect of teaching? The way the school year lasts way too long, but the grief of losing it takes a devastating toll. Outwardly we count down, celebrate, and “check out” so vehemently that our bodies don’t leave any space for honoring the corners of sadness. Those tiny dark pockets of “I’ll miss this”. 

The survivors of the rugby flight that crashed in the Andes still reunite annually, as it is a necessary healing process of their trauma bond. My sister-in-law mourned the end of her park ranger academy profoundly, and outwardly. It’s the annual feeling of the end of summer camp. The impossibly close bond of brotherhood, sisterhood, and everything in between, snipped by shears, except instead of a “grand opening”, it’s a graduation ceremony. 

Each year I will experience a slow growth of my heart, then the painful “snip” of that piece biopsied. Ok, alright, I get it. This is the price to pay. It’s the cost of the admission ticket for the promise of a fun-filled fair. 

 But now that I know, it becomes my job to feel it fully. It’s the least I can do to honor the complexities of being a person humbled with this profession.