The Final Graduation (dated 5/9/10)

by Richard Edfeldt

After Jacob's death, Karen created this blog to record insights in her grief journey.  I would periodically write my insights on notes posted to my Facebook page.  We feel it would be best served if we combined our efforts so I am beginning the process of copying those notes to this blog.  They won't be in chronological order but I will put the original date on each one.  



Graduation Day at Shorter College – We have now been to three of them for each of our children. Ben graduated in 2002, Katie in 2007, and, now, Jacob is an official 2010 graduate. Shorter College students, faculty, and board of trustees agreed to confer a graduate degree posthumously to Jacob during today’s commencement ceremony. It was a heart-wrenching and heart-warming experience.

As we were ushered to our VIP seats on the front row, waves of emotion rolled over us as we thought about the many times we had been on Shorter’s campus for a myriad of events in the lives of our three children. Each of those experiences were happy ones, though tears may have been involved – sometimes tears of anticipated separation as we left a new college student at the curb after moving them in on their first day of a new school year. At other times, there were tears of pride as one of our children received an award or some recognition.

Today, the tears that should have been ones of joy and pride were ones wrung out by grief and loss.

When the graduating seniors paraded in to their seats, one seat remained vacant – it was for Jacob. The student in the adjacent seat, a fraternity brother of Jacob, leaned forward and handed us a graduate’s mortarboard cap with the tassel – it was for Jacob.

They began to call out the names of each student and hand to them their well earned diplomas. When they came to his name, Provost Dr. Shull paused and explained to the packed gymnasium that the college had experienced the loss of a student, well loved by students and faculty alike and by unanimous decision by the board of trustees Jacob Blackburn Edfeldt was to receive a graduate’s diploma. Ben, Katie, Karen, and I were called up to the platform and we received the diploma that was Jacob’s singular goal to hold in his own hands. The tears increased as everyone stood and gave an extended standing ovation in honor and memory of a loved student, classmate, and friend.

The Commencement speaker was author Phyllis Tickle and she presented an excellent oratory about standing in the gate of beginnings and endings. She pointed out that each graduate was ending something grand in their lives and, at the same moment, they were also beginning something unknown, new, and exciting.

For my family, it is an ending of a wonderfully close relationship with a college that loved and shaped each of our children over these past twelve years. We will no longer have reason to go to the campus in search of one of our children. Ben (& Beth) and Katie have received their diplomas and have moved on to careers in which they were trained to do at their time at Shorter.

But for Jacob, though we have the diploma, he will forever be a Shorter College student. Her spirit was in him in his years he was there and now his spirit will, forever, be ‘on the hill’.

Shorter College, her faculty members and her students, gave such richness to Jacob’s final years on this earth. Karen and I were grateful recipients of watching the joy of college life shine brightly in Jacob’s eyes. Little did any of us know that these would be what we are now are forced to call ‘the final years of his life’.

Tears were plentiful today and they will be at times for the rest of our lives. But I know Jacob would want each of us to adhere to a saying of Dr. Seuss. Here is that saying:

“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.”

Jacob would not want us to cry because he is gone. He is now at perfect peace with a perfect body enjoying the glories of heaven. 

Instead, he would want us to smile at the memories of the ‘happenings’ of his life and how those ‘happenings’ have impacted our lives. 

And I am and will always be grateful that Jacob ‘happened’!