Class of 2010 Graduations That Never Took Place

This has been a hard month for us.  This is the month Jacob would have graduated from college.  Of course, that’s assuming he would have completed everything required in the traditional four years of college, but knowing Jacob, he would have made sure it only took four years.

This has actually been a hard day.  It was exactly four years ago today that Jacob graduated from high school with all his dreams for life ahead of him.  Four months later, he died in a car accident.

It has been 3 years, 8 months since Jacob died.

Why would something like a college graduation be so hard for us to face when Jacob never even came close to achieving that goal?  After all, he died only 5 1/2 weeks into his freshman year of college.  It’s hard because his college graduation was a major life milestone we fully expected to mark with Jacob that we will never get to experience.  At least not during this lifetime on this side of Heaven.  But the families of his surviving friends and classmates are able to joyfully celebrate as they always expected.

We’ve received college graduation announcements in the mail.  Jacob’s friends have posted things on facebook about their own graduations.  And they should!  This is an exciting time of life for them.  But it is a painful time for those of us who never got to see our own children celebrate that achievement.

Michael is one of Jacob’s good middle/high school friends, who attended the same university as him.  Tragically, Michael died in a car accident only one semester shy of graduation.  His parents didn’t get to see him walk across the stage to receive his college diploma either.  However, the university awarded Michael’s parents his dual major diploma on graduation night because Michael had earned enough college credits to receive both degrees.  I know it was very difficult and confusing for them to be there when Michael wasn’t there as they had always imagined he would be one day.  Tears of sadness and pain had replaced what they thought would be tears of pride and joy.

Zack is another classmate of Jacob’s who went to the same university.  Zack died about two months into what would have been his sophomore year at the university.  His parents never got to experience the joy of watching him graduate from college either.  That makes a total of three students from Jacob’s high school graduating class of 2006 that never made it to their college graduation at the University of Georgia.  A total of eight young people from that high school class  of approximately 350 students have now died.  The most recent occurred this spring.  When will it stop?

Later this week, Michael and I will be having dinner with some friends who lost their daughter in a car accident only 6 1/2 months after Jacob died.  She was only 14 at the time of her accident.  The night of our dinner with them is the night their daughter would have been graduating from high school.  They are choosing to do what we did on a day that holds so much pain and heartache for them.  Keep busy.  Get distracted by other activities.  Don’t sit at home completely absorbed in thoughts about what should have been.  These days can be like a living hell,  yet the rest of the world pretty much goes on unaware.

Life as normal.  Life as it should be.  I miss the simplicity of that.

Graduation is only the beginning.  There will be careers that get started, weddings that take place, and babies being born.  Those are all things we looked forward to celebrating with Jacob.  Several of my friends who have lost a child in their teen years have said that they either could not attend the weddings of their child’s friends or they cried their eyes out when they did attend.  That leaves me asking the difficult question, “Do I really want to attend such events?”  I certainly don’t want to offend anyone by NOT attending, but I also do not want to ruin their joyful occasion with my tears of pain and sadness.   After all, the events are not about me; they are about the person who is graduating, getting married or having a baby.

I miss the simplicity of life as it used to be.  I miss my son.

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