Graduation Day in Snow, Colorado Springs, Colorado

I haven’t been to a college graduation in a long time and so my granddaughter’s comes as a surprise. She has been very happy here, developing a fascination with Hamlet that bodes good things for her future as a graduate English student. The great benefit of an education in the humanities, now becoming a rarity, is its introduction via the Greek and Elizabethan playwrights to what they called “The tears in things.”

And here in the midst of sometimes raucous celebrations, there is perhaps an unconscious attempt to bury the tears in things: the suicide in the past two weeks of two of my granddaughter’s senior classmates. I am hoping there might be two minutes of silence in memory of these lost ones at the ceremony today.

It seems unlikely. Our white Protestant culture is still caught in the myth of Every Day Better and Better—which flies in the face of what most of us know about reality.

Colorado is largely white and, at least in terms of background, protestant, in the grip both of poverty and of accelerated growth. Both together lead to a stalemate.

I am grateful to live in majority/minority state where the cathedral bells for eight o’clock a.m. Mass at St. Francis often come to me on the morning breeze. I see the humility born of acceptance in the face of all the Spanish-speaking people who do my work and the work of all other well-off white newcomers as well as the work of the city.

It is not easy work and it is not well paid and since there are no benefits, the old and ill must rely on the care and support of their extended families, which seldom fails.

Yes, the tears in things—or, as Mathew Arnold wrote in his poem, “Dover Beach,” the extended roar of the wave of faith, withdrawing.

And this May snowstorm, the unexpected last of the season, reminds me of my dear son Will’s death in such a storm five years ago, and I pray that at the last, when he felt what Emily Dickinson called “First chill, then torpor, then the letting go,” he knew that he too was and is a child of God.

This is why I write.

In My Family, New Mexico William Bingham Iovenko