Embracing Endings: Reflections of a Graduating Student
Written By: Johann Cardenas, 5th Year Bioinformatics
Photo by: Frank Neufeld/Western Communications
Graduation is built up to be a never-ending celebration – with handshakes, flowers, and endless conversations with fellow graduates about travel and summer plans. Yet amidst the excitement, I can’t help but feel a strange sadness about the end of my undergraduate degree. Maybe you’re like me. Objectively, we should be happy. We are starting an exciting new chapter in our lives, realizing what were once only distant dreams, like graduate school or full-time employment. But looking forward also necessitates looking back into a dark mirror of complicated feelings, memories and thoughts that can be difficult to process.
For me, it’s partly about attachment. Admitting that the school where I spent the last 5 years still holds a special significance in my heart feels like confessing to arrested development. Yet to claim anything otherwise would be dishonest. As a residence don, Western was literally a second home to me. From the top floor of my residence building, the campus and its iconic buildings looked so picturesque yet familiar, that it’s hard to accept that soon it may only exist in memory. And memories fade; will the setting of experiences so vivid, powerful and personal, fade into indifference? Late nights in Weldon library, the brisk morning air as I hurried to my morning classes, the countless friendships and conversations… Will what was once meaningful to me eventually become meaningless? Western was a place of comfort and safety. After so many years here, navigating this campus has become second nature and with every experience I had and relationship I built, I made this place more of my own. Can I accept that it’s time to move on? That one day, without fanfare or romanticism, my story, and everything I’ve done here, will end?
As much as I grieve for what is done, I also grieve for the undone. These few remaining days before graduation, I fill my head with regrets for what could have been if I only had the prescience of what I know now. The irony of life is that you can only have a proper perspective on something once it ends. So much of what preoccupied us with worry proved ultimately inconsequential. The disappointing Physics mark in my first year ultimately did not matter. I spent so much time worrying about what other people thought about me, yet I never regretted what I had done, only what I was too cowardly to do. Perhaps the biggest regret is worry itself. I should have lived in the moment. Rather than constant anxiety about my future, I should have appreciated what was here: endless opportunities to learn and achieve, countless genuine connections, and even simply the way the sun reflects on the pavement pathways on UC Hill on sunny September days.
The saddest part about moving on is that it is both necessary and inevitable. So many of our deepest feelings and memories of our school days are inextricably connected with our development from naive teenagers into adulthood. University has taught us so much more than the subject matter of our classes. Every experience we had was a lesson in life itself and shaped who we are today. We may never go back to the way things were, we can never experience what was for the first time again. What will be missed most of all — our youth — can never be recreated. Yet we cannot simply choose to remain in place. To do so would be a rejection of everything given to us. It would amount to a betrayal of our teachers and loved ones who brought us here. But the biggest betrayal of all would be to ourselves, us who worked so hard and now deserve to flourish and make this community our own.
Despite these sad reflections, there’s a silver lining. We should feel joy in grief; deep grief means we loved just as deeply. You don’t feel attachment or regret for what could have been, without appreciating what was. Rather than let these feelings bring you down in your last days at Western, use them to uplift you: they are an affirmation of your love and appreciation for this place. And rather than regret what you could have done, transform that regret into the most important lesson you could have learned: to live your life, in all aspects, to the fullest. Learn everything that you can. Work hard and do things that you can be proud of. And appreciate everything. Every opportunity. Every relationship. Every acquaintanceship. Every happy coincidence. Every victory. Every failure. Every lesson. Every cool breeze. And every sunny September day.
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