G
raduation looms on the horizon. For
every college student, the idea of gradu-
ating college holds a bittersweet flavor,
caught between the satisfaction of accomplish-
ment and the sadness of goodbyes. For some, it
holds more of one than the other. It is sometimes
hard to tell which is stronger. Sometimes, the
bitterness wins.
At 21 years old, I’ve been a college student
for five years and have been at the University of
Michigan for three of them. I took courses at a
community college for two years in my child-
hood state of California before transferring to
the University. My mom encouraged me to ap-
ply since her and my stepfather’s resident sta-
tus would transfer to me. One acceptance letter
and months later, I was living much closer to
my mom and my sister Sydney’s family, which
I liked because I could visit them any time I
wanted.
I look back on the clueless 18-year-old from
the middle of nowhere in Northern California,
who was overwhelmed by the University’s size
and the sheer number of people during her first
few weeks of class. I remember how excited she
was to wake up to snow on the ground. That girl
could never have imagined that her path would
bring her this far or to this particular place. That
her senior year would be spent shut away in an
apartment off-campus. That by now she would
have accomplished and lost so much.
It was only three weeks into this winter se-
mester that I received a phone call from my sister
that our mom had passed away. She lived only 25
minutes away from me, but I hadn’t risked hug-
ging her in over a month because of the risk of
coronavirus contagion. She lived alone, having
separated from my stepfather a couple of years
ago. The only hint I got that something was
wrong was that she wasn’t responding to my
texts. I didn’t know she was gone until almost 24
hours after it happened. She was only 57 years
old.
Her funeral was simple. We wore masks and
social distanced. We ordered a bouquet of flow-
ers in her favorite color, purple, looking as much
like a bouquet of wildflowers she would have
picked herself as we could make it. I played her
favorite music and put together a long slideshow
of photos of her, even though she never liked
having her picture taken. We felt we needed
some event to celebrate her life, to mark the fact
that she was gone even though we couldn’t be-
lieve it, couldn’t accept it. Closure was the idea,
but we felt and still feel no closure.
I mark every accomplishment now in my
mind on a calendar of months since she was
alive. My first column in The Michigan Daily
this semester was spread out on her coffee table
when we went to her house to begin packing
her things. She had said she planned to frame it.
Since then, I published my first article in a non-
student publication and I won a Hopwood Un-
dergraduate Nonfiction Award: the outcome of
efforts she witnessed but of which never got to
see the rewards. On the one hand, I can’t imag-
ine having done any more or better in my under-
graduate career.
But on the other side of that, I thought that
I would be taking graduation pictures with her
now. She would be telling me how proud of me
she was.
I still haven’t taken any graduation pictures.
This chapter has a bitter ending for a lot of
people, with not a lot of closure. I know this is
not the senior year any of us imagined, distanced
from friends and family and normal life. I know
the loss that millions of people are experiencing
from losing their family members and friends to
this deadly pandemic.
I know I did not imagine having to lose my
mom so soon nor not being able to say goodbye.
I pushed through to graduation because I knew
she would want me to. But the bitter, bone-deep
ache of loss is much more powerful than any
shallow closure I feel from finishing my under-
graduate studies. That’s something I’ve been
grappling with a lot.
It’s natural to ask, “What if?” What if I had
taken a different course that semester, or had
done a different program or a different intern-
ship? What if this pandemic hadn’t happened
and I’d had a normal senior year? What if my
mom was still here? These questions have no an-
swers. We’ll never know what might have been.
The word “closure” seems to refer to the con-
cept of a definitive conclusion. With it comes a
sense of acceptance. Oh, sweet closure. There
is an implication of tying up loose ends, of un-
derstanding what happened and why. It’s what
happens at the end of fiction books. You turn
to the last page, you read the last lines, you see
the words “the end” printed on paper. You shut
the book and you feel satisfied. Everything hap-
pened for a reason and everything had its own
meaning.
But whether closure is ever achievable in
an ever-changing world where nothing can be
controlled or predicted, I don’t know. We work
and sometimes we succeed at the goals we set,
but do we ever feel that we have reached a con-
clusion?
Real-life is messy. Real-life doesn’t tie up
loose ends, or always offer a chance for goodbye.
We don’t know the reason that things happen or
what they mean. We have ideas, but no explana-
tions upon which we agree.
M
y mom brought me into the world
and raised me. She taught me to be
passionate and to fight for what I
care about — the environment, animals, people
— and encouraged me to utilize my strengths to
those ends, to follow my dreams. She took me
traveling and showed me to love the world and
all of the adventures it holds. She encouraged me
to apply to the University and she’s the reason I
studied environmental studies. Her encourage-
ment is why I write. In many ways, her dreams
for a better world live on in me.
The truth is, I didn’t come to the University
for the graduation ceremony. I came for the
years spent hunched uncomfortably over my
desk struggling to learn and write and grow. You
didn’t love someone just to go to their funeral.
You loved them for the impact they made upon
you.
At the end of this long, hard year, and stand-
ing at the crossroads of pathways into the future,
it is okay not to feel closure because this is not
the final page. There is too much left to do in this
world to feel that way.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
Wednesday, April 21, 2021 — 11
Closure
BY RACHEL MCKIMMY, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY