(Late) Graduation

Finishing last

Relation in Space by Marina Abramović and Ulay, 1977 (on view at the National Gallery of Canada)

The Sunday Letter #16

Dear Reader,

I finally graduated.

Do you know those moments, the kind when you’re forced to viscerally encounter your previous selves and account for all your past choices, mistakes, and regrets?

It was one of those weeks.

It was also two years too late. I was surrounded by strangers and no one from my original cohort. It was hardly well-earned; it went on forever and it was over too quickly all the same.

Here’s what happened.

*

In the summer of 2019, I was preparing to graduate from my undergraduate degree in political studies. I was also planning my wedding, navigating a cancer diagnosis¹, preparing to move to Ottawa for graduate school, and trying to process my father’s terminal diagnosis of lung disease.

In the midst of all the chaos, I was buoyed by a belief that the future would somehow be brighter: that I would settle into a new routine in a new town, that I would grow into an academic career while surrounded by exciting new people, and that absolutely none of my old problems would follow me. My father—at first delicately, and then eventually less so—urged me not to go. But I was 23. I didn’t yet know how to be unselfish. Sometimes I still don’t. So I left anyway.

But the problems caught up, in smaller and then bigger ways. I couldn’t stop sleeping in, and even though I lived on campus I was late for class constantly. I also couldn’t stop getting lost, the hilly campus making it so that a basement floor in one building was the ground floor of another, and maps were no help. I missed everyone. That November, I had to spend my limited graduate stipend on an emergency flight home when we thought my dad might be getting new lungs. He didn’t; I flew back to campus alone.

Despite the hardships, I loved being in grad school. The people were wonderful, the classes were stimulating, the performance of graduate student as self-pleasing as I’d hoped it would be. But I couldn’t write. I was paralyzed with fatigue. Assignments piled up. My teachers lavished praise on my in-class contributions but I couldn’t find the energy to hand anything in. By the end of the first semester, I was late on multiple final term papers and had to request extensions in most of my classes.

Christmas passed and a new term began. My father left home to be closer to the hospital where he hoped to receive new lungs which never came. Then March arrived, and my first year came to an abrupt close as I packed my life up in one city and hurried back to another, hoping, as we all did, that this “coronavirus” would be over within two weeks.

By May 2020, my father would be dead, I’d be taking two unpaid days off work (all I could afford), and I’d be feeling more alone than I ever had.

When the fall rolled back around, it became clear that school would move online for the foreseeable future, but I still chose to return to Ottawa, naive as ever that maybe this time my problems wouldn’t follow me back. The graduate program advisor, an angel on earth, urged me to take a leave of absence. I resisted, defiant and committed to the last shreds of normalcy I could muster.

But it all happened again. I couldn’t keep up, I was falling apart, I was sure that I was the only person in the world who couldn’t keep her shit together. So I finally gave up the new city that I loved and I moved home. I kept up with online school, and I finished all of my credits by the end of my second year, with the exception of one class with a particularly grumpy professor. I sent one last email, asking for compassionate acceptance of my late assignments, only to learn that he’d gone on a one-year sabbatical and was unreachable.

So began two years of bureaucratic agony, too boring to recount here, in which I fought with my former school to finally let me have my degree. I’m embarrassed to detail the process any further because, truly, I understand that a lot of it was my fault. Had I made better choices, had I shown myself grace, had I been less selfish…how much would be different? All of it? None of it? Nevertheless, everyone I went, there I was.

*

When I was finally able to apply to graduate, I immediately booked a solo flight to attend the ceremony. It had been two and a half years since I was last in Ottawa, this adopted city that had come to love me back despite my failings. As the capital of Canada, it was also a city that my dad loved and for which he held a deep reverence, having come to Canada through asylum in the late 70’s. When he visited many years ago, he’d once told me, he’d stood at the steps of Parliament and reflected on how grateful he was for all of it.

I expected to be a bit nervous returning, seeing old friends, having to account for my absence and my delays. But when I arrived, I was hit by a familiar crest of loneliness: the loneliness of travelling and the sense that I was truly alone and momentarily unaccountable to anyone or anything else. It’s a forcefully creative and propulsive loneliness. I walked past my last apartment, through my old neighbourhood, and recalled that it was there that I had really begun to take my own writing seriously, as a means for understanding myself. I felt, not for the first time, all of my former selves, layered through me.

The next day, I arrived at my old campus for the graduation. I was early, and I chatted idly with two women who were graduating from the PhD program. They remarked on how astonished they were to finally be there, crossing the threshold into a post-academic life. One of the women mentioned that her grandchildren were watching the live stream at home. The other woman mentioned that even though she was graduating last in her cohort, she felt strongly that she needed to be there, having gone through the loss of her father and a divorce while in the PhD program. “There was no way that I wasn’t going to come today,” she told me. “I need to walk across that stage to feel that there was a reason for it all.”

A few volunteers marshalled us through the holding space into the auditorium for the ceremony, and as the drums thrummed around us, I realized that I hadn’t told any family or friends that there would be a live stream. It was a Wednesday morning and I was hit suddenly with a sense that no one I knew would be watching. We were led to the front row, and I looked up to see that two of my favourite professors were sitting on the stage as part of the academic procession. Two people whose kindness had buoyed me when I wanted to give up, many times. I lost any sense of control and let the tears flow as they wished.

After I’d crossed the stage, I opened the envelope to ensure that I’d received the right diploma, that my name was on it, that it was finally all over, for real. But as I looked down at the names on my degree, I was hit all over again with the weight of the last few years. There was my first name, Raquel, for my dad’s mother and his sister. My middle name, Anna, for the aunt who raised him when his own mother couldn’t. My last name, Alvarado, carried over to me from Chile across multiple generations and a multiplicity of paternal wounds. None of it should have been possible: his escape from the dictatorial regime of his homeland, his landing in the middle of Canada totally alone at only 27 years of age, his eventual courtship with my mother two decades later. And here I was, holding a degree that he never got to see me receive.

At my high school graduation, he’d teased me, “This won’t be the last time we’ll be watching you get a degree.” I used to think, of my three siblings, that I was the least interesting to him. But I think he’d seen me, and understood me, all along.

I check my phone: a friend of two decades congratulates me, having watched the live stream to see me cross the stage. I run into one of my old professors, and I pass on my thanks to the professor and advisor that I can’t find in the crowd. They both email me later in the day expressing congratulations. My former professor remarks on a comment I made in 2019 about care work in academia that she somehow still remembers and I am struck, yet again, by a sense that we can leave deep impacts on each other without ever being made aware.

My dad was a painter, a teacher, and a framer. He framed my undergraduate degree, ten months before his own death, when his vision was already weakening. He made a few mistakes and there is some dirt and a little hair caught under the frame. I don’t know who will frame this one.

It’s been three years since he died, and I thought it had gotten easier, or at least I thought that the life surrounding my grief had gotten big enough to contain it all. But I understand, too, that he is always with me, not least because of my names, and not even in a spiritual way. But because I am quick to anger, like he was, though I’m working on it, which I suppose he was too. My mind’s always a bit disjointed, like his was. He taught me to look closely at art, to deconstruct every brushstroke. When we were young, he traded his art for books and dental care and sometimes that embarrassed me but now I think it was rad. He was well-known in our little town and I’m glad he was able to bask in it, even though we teased him constantly. He loved his grandchildren but he’ll never get to meet my kids. He had a limp and no passport. We walked too quickly for him to keep up, and we never left the country for vacations. As I got older I learned to slow down to walk beside him instead of in front of him. He loved literature and it took me too long to appreciate that he’d taught himself an entire language and read all of the classics in his new tongue. It took me too long to appreciate anything.

*

After the ceremony ends, I spend the rest of my week in Ottawa wandering through the old haunts: bookshops, galleries, neighbourhoods, all these old memories coming back to life. I catch up with friends, we talk about the people they’re seeing, the jobs they love or hate, and we marvel at how we all somehow ended up in this weird vicinity of “adulthood.”

All week, upon learning that I was in town for my graduation, I was asked the same question by strangers, Uber drivers, and servers: “So, what’s next?” How to explain that I’ve been in the “next” part for two years already, and I feel no more equipped to answer that question than I ever was.

I visit the Gallery to see Maman again. It’s my first time visiting her in the summer, and she looks soft in the shimmering daylight. Families gather underneath her for photos, marvelling at her size and strength.

The Gallery has Picasso and Matisse, my dad’s favourites. They also have a series of Marina Abramović photographs on display (seen above) in which she runs repeatedly into her partner Ulay. It’s called Relation in Space and it shows a chaotic and playfully doomed relationship in motion—two bodies, trying desperately to make something new and better but never quite succeeding. It is horribly romantic.

I leave the Gallery and wander aimlessly through the busy ByWard Market towards nowhere in particular. I listen to a playlist I made of my dad’s favourite music and smile as The Head and the Heart buzz in my ears: “Lord have mercy on my rough and rowdy ways.”

I have lunch with an old friend who laments that she has started seeing someone wonderful, just as she has to prepare to move away to a new city. I think that’s just how it always goes, people come in and out of our lives when they will. And sometimes that urgency propels us into each other’s arms, clinging for refuge from change.

After lunch I stumble upon a familiar little restaurant called Chez Lucien, where I sit with my book in the upper mezzanine and order a glass of white wine and escargot. Sinatra’s New York, New York is playing and the waitress is singing along in a raspy voice, watching herself in the mirror behind me as she takes my order. She is young and has big glasses and a deep voice and after she congratulates me on graduating she bounces back downstairs and launches right into a conversation with a customer about dead old jazz singers. As I leave the restaurant, I’m struck with the realization that all the places I used to go in this city were always much closer to each other than I ever realized. Different people meeting in different places in a different time, and it’s all so far away now.

I head back to the hotel to pack up, and I sit for a while longer in the lobby, unwilling to leave just yet. A hotel employee is saying to another, “I don’t know man, as soon as you fall in love, you’ll know.”

On the plane ride home, I’m dizzy as always, made more disoriented than usual because we’re flying west and thus through the sunset. One of the flight attendants is telling the other that she doesn’t know what day it is, and the other complains about one of the passengers. One of them will be leaving the company soon and the others tease her for choosing stability over the freedom of the job. I look through my photos of the trip, from the picture in the ceremony gown taken by a stranger who told me to smile through my tears, to the pictures taken of old friends, to the strangers standing under Maman. A couple in front of me holds hands across the aisle as the plane lands. We’re finally home, all of us yawning and rubbing our eyes, reuniting with loved ones, dispersing into the night.

1. Fictionalized sentiments on my cancer journey here.