Missed milestones: Facing a spring of no proms, no graduations
Beyond the enormous death toll it has created, the coronavirus outbreak is leaving behind “a trail of quieter heartbreaks,” said Ellen Byron in The Wall Street Journal. Across the country, such once-in-a-lifetime events as weddings, proms, and graduations are being canceled, and people are quietly mourning the loss of those long-anticipated moments. It’s not hard to find an expectant mother who hoped to be surrounded by family when she delivered her first child, only to learn that even her husband might be barred from the delivery room, said Ben Crandell and Phillip Valys in the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Or, at life’s far end, to find a funeral send-off shrunk to a handful of mourners, if that. And sitting between those poles are rites like Talia Katz’s recent bat mitzvah, which was scheduled to be celebrated in Italy but instead transpired on Zoom. “In the end,” says the 12-year-old, “it doesn’t matter where you do it—it matters who you’re spending it with.”
Older teenagers may be hurting the most, said Christopher Null in Wired.com. My own daughter is a high school senior devastated by the sudden loss of a final track season, prom, and graduation. “I’m not ready to give up the last three months of being a kid,” she says. College seniors are having a similar experience, said Zach Schermele in TeenVogue.com. But as universities have canceled or dramatically postponed cap-and-gown ceremonies,
“an inspiring trend has emerged.” Students are dreaming up ways to replace the rituals they’ve been working toward for four years. In mid-March, shortly before they all were sent home, seniors at the University of Maine responded to the termination of the spring semester by quickly organizing a “coronamencement” at which members of the Class of 2020 lined up 6 feet apart to receive mock diplomas, highfive the school mascot, elbow-bump the dean of students, and walk off with a squirt of hand sanitizer.
Most graduation ceremonies, including my own, will require even more creativity, said Pearse Anderson in TheVerge.com. Fortunately, many university seniors stuck at home have returned to Minecraft, a favorite video game from their youth, and started building replicas of their schools’ campuses in the game’s threedimensional virtual world (see Technology). Come May, graduates will be able to parade down familiar pathways and even onto a stage to receive a virtual diploma. Two Boston University students have established a server called Quaranteen University and extended invitations to an international “Quaranteen Commencement” on May 22. About 800 participants from hundreds of colleges have registered so far, including me. “When I walk across the stage, I will be proud to be with the Class of 2020 in whatever strange and ragtag form that takes.”