The Class of 2020

This should have been one of the great periods of life for high school seniors. My friends have been talking about all the missed milestones, a conversation prompted by the continuing domino collapse of season-ending tournaments. Graduation ceremonies, proms, the various culminations of four years of sports efforts—you name it, they''re not going to happen, or at best they will happen as mere simulacra. All of this is exaggerated by senioritis, that sense of being done with high school and being ready to move on and having to suffer through the dragging of time that is keeping you from the next step. None of this is fanciful. All of this is true and real.

There is something else beyond rituals that comes with being a senior in the last few months of school. For all practical purposes, aside from a few classes that might still need your efforts, the game is over. And more to the point: you have won. You have made it. You have changed from that raw, unformed ninth grader into, nearly four years later, a Master of the Universe, that universe being high school. You have gone through most of the most difficult business of adolescence, and survived. You have faced every hurdle secondary school can throw at you academically, be it courses you know you’ll never use in your future life or teachers sent directly from Dante’s Inferno to torture you. You have gone through a life-changing period with a handful of others who will not only live in your memory forever, but who may indeed become part of your life for all time. And now it is April, and you still have a couple of months more of school, and you are filled with this sense of universe mastery. It is the air that you breathe, it is the aura that surrounds you as you walk down the hallways. You know every nook and cranny of that school, you know how to get everything done that has to be done, you know where every body is buried and which skeletons are in every closet. It is a heady feeling, and it is one of the few times in your life that you will get to enjoy it.

Except not this year. Not for the class of 2020. Just when they should be enjoying the glow of accomplishment and the pride of position, just as they should be enjoying that magic island of contentment located between one finished phase of life and the next wide-open and even more vast phase of promise and opportunity, all of that has been taken from them. Oh, sure, they still get to feel a little sense of it, but they don’t get to live it day in and day out, striding the hallways in their full Master of the Universe personae. They’ll never really know what that is like. And that’s a shame.

Is this the worst thing happening during the pandemic? Hardly. Lives are literally being lost, more lives than we can comprehend. But that doesn’t lessen its reality. My heart goes out to the class of 2020. You only get to be certain things once in your life. Missing any of those things is a big hit. Missing this one may be the worst. You have my sympathy.