Henry Abbott

The weight of feeling doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It rises anyway—a lump in your throat, a sadness you can’t outrun. I am scared of how deeply I feel. It would be easier, I think, to harden myself against it, to live the final precious weeks of the semester untouched. But I care—about this place, about the people around me, about time slipping through our fingers. And as much as it hurts, I know that to feel at all is a gift.

I sense many of us carry these emotions quietly, reluctant to give voice to them, as though naming our fears and sorrows might make them too real. I’d like to challenge that instinct. This feeling—heavy, inconvenient, deeply human—is something worth embracing. Like the steam that drifts from the heating plant and into our radiators, mostly unseen but impossible to live without, we are all connected in ways we don’t always notice. I hope that writing this helps to open the door to more of these conversations.

On Tuesday night, I went to “Emotional Man,” a stand-up piece by Lucas O’Neil ’12 performed at Wish Theater. I’ve gotten to know Lucas this semester—he’s been auditing my British Film class—but it wasn’t until halfway through that we learned he was a comic. In class, Lucas struck me as a little reserved but endearingly hipster with a knack for asking good questions.

Watching him on stage, I met a different Lucas: someone using humor to wrestle aloud with what it means to grow up, to lose people, to carry old sadness into new places. Toward the end of the show, he said something that stuck with me: “Grief is a series of moments of conflicting joy and pain.”

As he said it, flashes of joy rushed in alongside the sorrow—spontaneous drives to Land’s End, catching concerts in Portland (and on campus), laughing with friends in the Howell living room until our faces hurt. I could go on.

It felt like someone had peeled me open and put into words what I hadn’t been able to name. It’s precisely what I have felt these past months as a senior approaching graduation. Joy and pain tangled together so tightly that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Maybe that’s the point of living at a place like the College. Your heart stretches wider than you expect. It wraps itself around friends and strangers alike, around faces you pass without knowing, around names you only learn through the stories they leave behind. And choosing to carry that sadness—letting yourself feel it instead of turning away—might be one of the ways we keep each other here and learn from one another even after we’re gone.

Loss has been present each year I’ve been at the College. Over time, the names have accumulated in consciousness. Henry Zietlow ’22. Theo Danzig ’22. Finnegan Woodruff ’21. Omar Osman ’26. Charlotte Billingsley ’24. K Zhan ’25.

Save for a couple I had passing conversations with, I didn’t know them personally. Some were friends of friends, their lives brushing up against mine only indirectly. But over the years, through the rituals of remembering, they have taken shape. A pattern emerges in their shared qualities: kindness without condition, a fierce passion for the things they loved, a stubborn hopefulness that softened into gentleness. They embodied, in their different ways, the kind of spirit the College at its best tries to cultivate—earnest, humble, quick to care.

Their absence is not something you can measure easily. It’s more like a shift in the air, a quiet knowledge that the heart of this place is made up of those who moved through it and left pieces of themselves behind. I sometimes wonder what it would have meant to know them better—if closeness would have deepened this ache or softened it. I still don’t know the answer.

Maybe that’s part of belonging to a place like this: Your heart stretches around people you’ve never met. And remembering them—choosing to carry the ache even when it would be easier to look away—is how we honor them. It is also how we change. Grief doesn’t just crack you open; it reshapes you. It presses against your ribs, fills the empty spaces, teaches you to listen harder, to hold people closer.

The thing about feeling so deeply, about letting your heart stay open even when it would be easier to close it, is that it sharpens everything else, too. This spring, every moment feels magnified. The highs are higher. The lows cut a little deeper. A good conversation can sit with you for hours. A goodbye can linger in your throat long after you’ve said it or as you prepare to.

Watching underclassmen brings an ache of envy. They still have time. I catch myself wishing I could borrow a little more. But even that envy, I think, is a kind of love—a stubborn wish to hold onto something beautiful just a little longer.

Maybe that ache, too, is a reminder. That all of this—the joy, the grief, the laughter, the heartbreak—means we were here. We are here. And we cared enough to feel it, even if it hurt like hell.

Thank you, Amelia Jacobson, for your editing wisdom.

Mason Daugherty is a member of the Class of 2025.