All about family for 9 cousins, all of them high school seniors
Anna McBride is a New Trier High School senior, part of what you might call the Coronavirus Class, a demographic born in the wake of 9/11 and reaching its first big milestone under the cloud of a global pandemic.
Those are unenviable bookends, to be sure. But like most of us, McBride and high school seniors across the country are looking for positives to grab on to. A sturdy foothold on a slippery slope.
For her, that positive lies in family, both the immediate and the nearby. The 17-year-old has an unusual familial network creating a safe port in her disrupted life — a close-knit cluster of eight cousins, all high school seniors in the Chicago area.
“It’s honestly really, really uplifting,” she said. “This obviously sucks a lot. We all watched our older siblings graduate, so this was going to be a really big year for all of us. Then all of a sudden this just comes along.”
The virus wiped out the things many seniors have daydreamed about since starting high school: prom, a skip day, a final sports season, final moments with friends, graduation.
McBride and her cousins know how fortunate they are — the coronavirus hasn’t caused them or their families the kind of turmoil many now face. But that doesn’t diminish their frustrations or disappointment. Perspective comes with time, and high school seniors this year have every right to feel a sense of loss.
“It’s like a rite of passage,” McBride said. “It reinforces that you did it just like everyone else did. It makes you feel accepted and normal. Now I kind of feel like an outsider. I feel like I’m eternally a junior in high school.”
But she doesn’t have to feel that way alone. She has her circle of cousins: Mia Cavalier, Nick Cavalier, Jack Kelly and Owen Hirsch, fellow seniors at New Trier; Emmy Galante and Katie Itaya, seniors at Glenbrook South High School; Cailin Kozlowski, a senior at Barrington High School; and Michael McBride, a senior at St. Ignatius High School.
They knew they were close. They knew they were there for one another. But the coronavirus lockdown threw those facts into sharp relief.
McBride said: “When we first found out we were going on lockdown, we all got together at our grandparents’ house and we got our heads together and said, ‘We’re all going to go though this together. Let’s not isolate, let’s get through this together.’ ”
So now the cousins chat group regularly lights up with questions, check-ins and words of encouragement.
“We’ve been seeing each other every now and then, we’ll hang out in someone’s backyard or driveway or front porch,” Nick Cavalier said. “It’s definitely nice company, ’cause I haven’t been seeing my friends much. We talk about how this is all screwing up our future plans. We just kind of lift each other up.”
Emmy Galante agreed: “It’s cool to kind of have these other shoulders to lean on during this. We’ve always been close, but this has kind of brought us closer.”
McBride’s mother, Sarina McBride, along with the other cousins’ parents, have watched with pride as this group has navigated the isolation of a pandemic and a wrecked senior year. The seniors are poised to go their separate ways in the fall, most to colleges on either the West or East coasts. But now Sarina McBride listens to her daughter daydream about future reunions with the cousins.
“This has been such a special thing for them,” the mother said. “The kids are very different, they have different friend groups. But they’re kind of like brothers and sisters, they’re going to pal around together because it’s safe and they have each other’s backs. Having them, for Anna, has been one thing that has really pulled her through.”
Together, they’ve made the most of things. On May 1, when seniors would normally come to school in college gear, the cousins put on their T-shirts and hoodies and got together as their families paraded them between one another’s houses.
When one felt down at the thought of finishing high school at home in a bedroom, the others swept in to help.
“The gratitude is trying to not think about all that isn’t there, but all that was there and all that we have to be thankful for,” Anna McBride said. “This is unprecedented, and it’s the first big, difficult thing some people my age have had to deal with. This is the first big bomb dropped on my life. Now I know how to take them and keep my head up and keep going.”
And she knows she has a group that’s rock solid. She has family.
Maybe this time apart has reminded us that those closest are truly the most important. The mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles and, of course, cousins.
They’re the anchors, the rocks. They’re the rope ladders that pull us up.
All we have to do is grab on.