FRANKLIN — Life moves on. Often in mysterious ways.
On the day my younger brother would have turned 55, I sat in a robe watching students, a number of them mine, walk across a stage to collect their diplomas, the tangible symbols of years of study, worry and sacrifice.
The coincidence of the commencement exercises and my late brother’s birthday prompted reflection on life’s vicissitudes — and its so often obscured meanings.
For most of his life, my brother saw himself as a champion of life’s underdogs. Before he lost a hard battle with esophageal cancer nearly four months ago, he had worked as a small-town newspaper reporter and editor and an attorney specializing in poverty law. He worked in group homes, providing care for people with disabilities and other challenges.
He dreamed, often, of opening a legal service that would be free to those who needed help but couldn’t afford to pay. He wanted to call it the Tom Joad Law Clinic, after the downtrodden hero in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
As I sat in my heavy black robe, I thought that my brother would have liked my students.
Like him, like me, like our sister, almost all of them come from families of modest means. For them, as it was for us, going to college was not an effortless lift. Like us, most of them went to work early and learned to balance going to school with holding down jobs.
The experience shaped them, as it did my brother, my sister and me.
When we received our diplomas, we knew just how much sweat and effort had gone into securing that little document.
As do my students.
And their families.
Franklin College — the school where I teach, the school from which I graduated — has a long history of serving first-generation college students.
A few days before graduation, in one of the last classes of the semester, one of my students asked me what drew me to Franklin. After he asked the question, every eye in the room swiveled in my direction.
I told my students that Franklin never had been a school for those who already had it made. It was a college for those who were striving to make it.
“I’ve always seen my job as that of being the guy who levels the playing field,” I told them, thinking of my brother as I spoke. “I work to make sure you’ve got a fair shot.”
I remembered that moment as I watched my students, moving slowly in their own black robes, cross the stage. I know where a lot of them came from — and how much ground they had to cover to get to this point.
Several worked not just to pay for their schooling but to help keep a parent or siblings in their homes. Some have had either parents or siblings spend time behind bars. More than a few have had to deal with economic disasters — parents losing jobs or a devastating illness — during their college years.
But they toughed it out. They made it to this stage. This moment. I’m proud of them.
One thing my brother always appreciated was the power of occasions such as this, times when moments become milestones.
Every year, our college’s leaders ask members of the audience to hold their applause until all the graduates have received their diplomas.
And every year the audience ignores the instruction.
Who can blame them? That brief instant in which a child, a sibling, a grandchild, a spouse or a dear friend has crossed a threshold is a big deal, something to cheer about. Sometimes, even deeper emotions are stirred.
At one point in the ceremony, a female student — not one of mine — walks off the stage, diploma in hand. Her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, comes out of the stands to walk beside the young woman. They walk to the end of the long row of seats, then embrace, their shoulders shaking as they sob in each other’s arms.
As I watched them, I thought of moments such as that one. I thought of where my students had come from and where they were going — the differences they would make in this hard world.
I wished my brother were with me to see all this. And I hoped that maybe he was.
Life moves on. Often in mysterious ways.
