An Open Letter to the Class of 2022
May 25, 2022
To The Class of 2022,
In the fall of 2019 — when each of you were entering your sophomore year — I won a trip to France. The plan was that in April I would board a plane, jet across the Atlantic, and spend a week touring Paris, writing in cafes and walking ancient streets.
That trip never happened. In the spring of 2020, tens of thousands of trips were canceled, along with piano recitals, garage sales, street fests, college reunions, road races, doubleheaders, fireworks displays, honeymoons, fan conventions, and Memorial Day parades. We didn’t have a graduation ceremony in May of 2020. I attended two wakes on Zoom.
The pandemic was only the beginning of my suffering. Teaching — the job that renewed and sustained me — was reduced to a glorified telemarketing shift. It was harder to coach, less rewarding to direct. Kobe Bryant, Alex Trebek, and Chadwick Boseman all died. Before the year was over, my wife lost her job and my daughter was hospitalized. I passed a kidney stone. If you’re wondering what the “Sorry About Your Kidney Stone” section of Hallmark cards looks like… it’s grim.
I don’t remember when I broke. One minute I was opening a magazine notice informing me that my subscription had expired, and the next I was bracing myself against the recycling bin, sobbing. It wasn’t the sort of cathartic wail that releases something caged. It was the crying that is like bleeding, the leaking of an unsutured wound. The worst part is that there is no way to make yourself understood, to share the burden. What could I say to anyone else? Yes, yes, our houses are all on fire, but my fire is different. It is easier to say that your tooth hurts than your heart is broken because everyone’s teeth hurt the same.
The failure I wept for was not my school, my friends, or my country. It was me. The things I believed as a father, the work I’d put into my family, it was all insufficient. I had failed at the most important job I would ever do, and I could not paper over that trauma. I’m a professional educator; I know the consequences of botched parenting. There was no wriggling off of shame’s hook.
But calendars turn. I renewed my magazine subscription. I learned about parenting a child with depression. I got vaccinated, then boosted. My classroom reopened, first for half my students, then all of them. I saw a Marvel movie in the theater. It was pretty good.
And then last month I went to France. I recommend it. Like the rest of Europe, Paris is a place of epochal vibes, where generations are born and strive and retire and are built upon without remark. You can feel it in the ancient walls, the mortar older than my country, a bland indifference to anything other than centuries. The French, I found, can balance that disinterest with hot bouts of laughter, good wine, and smelly cheese.
I loved learning about Paris’s patron saints. Do you know what it takes to be canonized? A miracle and a martyrdom. My favorite was Saint Denis, whose curious statue I discovered in a park in Montmartre. He was the first bishop of Paris, a third century Catholic who was known to walk through the polytheistic Gaul regions of Lutetia, defiantly preaching the Gospel. Legend has it that Saint Denis was beheaded for his proselytizing, but rather than giving up the ghost, his torso picked up its discarded head, which continued to preach. It is said that he walked another six kilometers before finally accepting his death. The miracle of Saint Denis converted many souls that day.
But for most Parisians, miracles were more muted. One of the most jarring experiences of COVID has been the openness with which we’ve seen one another’s suffering, in crowded ERs and open graves. It brings to mind how until very recently, anguish and death were done in plain view within major cities, blood in the streets. The Hôtel-Dieu is on the northern bank of Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine also home to Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s a hospital supposedly founded in 651 by Saint Landry, and it’s the world’s oldest medical facility still in operation. Today an ambulance will bring patients to the Hôtel, but in Landry’s time peasants would put the sick and dying on boats and float them down the Seine, hoping that “Dieu” would guide them to healers. Ordinary people, set adrift on planks and driftwood, praying for the river to heal them. It wasn’t madness. It was faith in miracles.
Every morning for a week I got up early and ran along the Seine. I imagined the canal through the many eras of Paris, first a Celtic fishing village then a Roman hub, before the Franks claimed it for good in the sixth century. I pictured her banks lined by fearful peasants who took up arms behind the calls of Saint Geneviève; I heard old bells in ancient cathedrals; I saw barges lit by lanterns bearing kings and princes. Young lovers inspired by a night’s possibility. The forlorn leaping from wooden bridges, seeking peace beneath the riverbed.
That last thought returned me to my own sorrow. At my low point, a part of me had wanted to give up. But I drifted on. A trip that I considered lost had returned to me. My wife found a new job; my daughter earned a measure of peace and stability. I could not forget the circumstances that interrupted the life I thought I was going to have. But I also could let go of the anger, grief, and shame that kept me anchored to them. I could forgive.
It was springtime in Paris. The river welcomed me; I had found my way to the Hôtel.
On the occasion of your graduation, I invite you to think of the lives and deaths and rebirths of anonymous saints. When the quarantine was introduced, we just kept teaching, learning, and schooling without really pausing to mourn. The pandemic cut off our heads, and we continued preaching, marching blindly. But our sermons turned to grievances. The difference between Bishop Denis the saint and Denis the zombie is that the man of God finally accepted his wound. You have to really die before you can come back.
The lesson here is not that time heals all wounds, because sometimes time just buries us. Nor do I want you to think that an expensive trip to Europe fixes everything. Wherever you go — whether it be the Champs-Élysées or the Dollar Tree — you bring your troubled head with you. No, the point is this: at some point in your life, you will be martyred. You will be cut down for something you love — a job, a relationship, a cause. When that happens, you may be tempted to carry on, babbling about the indignity or shame of it all. I lugged around my guilt and anger for two years. It was exhausting. And there was another way to bear it.
If I could see that troubled man again, I would tell him to set down his weeping head, to find a small boat. Point it towards the Hôtel, I’d tell him. You might float for a long time, but it is faith that will make it bearable. Faith in healing, in forgiveness. In rebirth. You can’t force a miracle. You can thrash against the water all you want. But the river only flows one way.
I hope that makes sense. I’m deeply proud of you all.
Sincerely,
Mike Rossi
