Graduating from College & Grief

Throughout the past four years, we’ve been told by countless people that our time at college will fly by so fast, and for that to say yes to everything.

The first is certainly true; it feels like it was just yesterday that we met at a rush event freshman year for the business fraternity we both joined, and it’s truly hard to believe that in just a few days, we will be walking the stage for graduation. In just two weeks, we will be moving out of our beloved college house, the Maze, and we won’t be able to pop into each other’s rooms and “sync up,” as we always say. Our countless nights of doing homework together, going out together, and simply existing together will be a fragment of the past, as we both move to different places to start jobs with varying time-off policies.

Living with each other has certainly been a highlight of our college experience, but for reasons that we always say we hate. Within our first two years of college, we both faced brutal break-ups, losing our pets, and within six months of each other, we both lost a parent. Emily’s mom, Nora, passed away from ovarian cancer just a month before we came back for our junior year. My dad, Thom, passed away the night before finals started during the fall of junior year. Even though we had both faced similar challenges over the past few years, it took us a while to become comfortable talking about them. Through our friendship, we realized that discussing our grief and relating to one another made everything feel a little less heavy, which inspired us to build our club, Good Grief.

Our shared experiences navigating grief during college make the idea of graduation something particularly hard to stomach. For the past few months, we have been talking about how ready we are to move on to the next chapter of our lives. But as we write this together, we realize how much we will miss this college town, our friends living just a few minutes away, our professors, peers, and everything in between. We’ve traveled together, had sleepovers in each other's beds, and found so much joy in the dark moments we've shared. We’ve heard too much about the “post-grad scaries,” feeling lost after college, away from friends, and facing adulthood. Part of this makes us laugh, because we think we may have grown up a little too fast. But it’s also hard to ignore the fact that this next chapter in our lives comes with an element of fear and uncertainty.

Feeling connected to our parents has always been difficult at school, especially when we have been so busy with our respective majors, leading and creating new organizations, and still trying really hard to pour into our friendships and hobbies. As graduation approaches, it’s crazy to think that our parents won’t be here to see us. It’s even crazier to realize that this version of ourselves is one that our parents don’t know. Graduation itself is a new form of grief that we are actively learning to navigate. With our final chapter of our parents knowing us coming to a close, the way of life we have been living for so long is passing us by, and saying goodbye to the community that we have built is very bittersweet.

The word bittersweet is the best word we can use to describe this period of time.

While we are so proud of this huge milestone we are completing, the unknown of what our future holds is both scary and exciting. But we will hold close the memories we made, the people who kept us going, and Virginia Tech, where we will always feel at home.