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

