The Ones Who Come Before

Back in college I was involved in an a cappella group - the W&M Cleftomaniacs. Most attractive group of people on campus since 1693. Despite my turbulent, emotional, and alcoholic sophomore year and junior fall semester, the members of the Cleftos stood by me and helped me through a rough transitional period, from an era of self hate and destruction to one of love and balance. Suffice to say, the members of the Cleftomaniacs became my family.

Now as is the case with all things, the Cleftos changed over the years. Those whom I had grown to see as the foundation of the group, its cornerstones, graduated and moved on with their lives, and as each spring rolled by another set of seniors would depart. Eventually myself and others in the group that were my year became the Polaris of the group, steering it through our final year at William & Mary.

But in the wake of becoming the mastheads of this adventure, something else happened too. I remember specifically being in "The Haus" - the off campus house that myself, fellow Cleftomaniac Sarah "Smee", theater and dance student Keaton, and former Cleftomaniac and theater student Christine lived in - at the start of our fall term, and Jess was downstairs in Christine's room. The three of us sat around talking, and Jess brought up how she felt about the Cleftos as a whole. That the group she had grown to love since her freshmen year was gone now, and the group simply didn't feel the same as it once did for her, and that she wasn't enjoying it or gave care to it nearly as much as she had earlier in her time at William & Mary.

It was rather shocking to hear, for me at least. Simply because for me this was the start of the year where I would get to help lead a group of people that had meant and done so much for me. But, alas, she was right. The group I had known, the one that had helped me in my recovery was indeed gone - graduated and off starting their own lives - and the group wasn't the same, and never could be again, because the people themselves WERE the group, and if they had gone, what was the group to me now?

Later that year, in fact, in our final spring term, moments before the Cleftos were about to take the stage for the Winter Showcase (a concert featuring all a cappella groups from the college), I distinctly remember being hit by a wave of indifference. Glancing around at the younger members of the group, their intensity and seriousness at the gravity of this apparently very important performance, I didn't feel anything. In this moment just before I performed (and solo-ed) and began my last "hurrah" as a seniors of the Cleftomaniacs - a group that we, as seniors, had molded over the course of our membership from a casual singing group into a well-respected, well funded, musically talented establishment of the college - in this moment when I should have felt a deep sense of excitement and pride and intensity, I felt indifferent. Like the whole arrangement, the whole set up of college kids in musical groups quietly competing and practicing their hearts out to be the best and most revered a cappella group on campus, was a comical whimsy and nothing to be taken seriously.

I went over to my fellow seniors and gingerly asked them both if they were at all feeling what I felt. Almost instantly a sense of relief fell between the four of us as we realized we were all in the same mindset. It wasn't so much that the group didn't matter to us, that it's members were disposable or we regretted out time in the group. Rather that even in the midst of our continued love and devotion to the Cleftos, we recognized it as a part of our lives that "was", a part of who we used to be, but were no longer. We had multiple "cider runs" (when you and your friend/s bundle up and take a stroll down picturesque Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg to get a pint of their delicious apple cider) during the winter and spring of our senior year, during which we discussed how we all were at a point in our collegiate lives where the promise of adulthood had given a sour taste, or no taste at all, to aspects of our time at William & Mary that once burst with flavor. We were ready, we said, for college to be over. To jump headfirst into the real world and all the excitement and possibility it seemed to have for us both. To live the adventure and the unknown of the world, alongside the now alumni of the Cleftomaniacs who, like Jess had said, were the ones we had grown so attached to and had made the group what it was for us.

I say all of this to get to my thought I'm thinking: is this how older people feel? Much older people? When all of the people they've grown up with, and grown to love, pass away and pass on into "the adventure and the unknown"? Are they like we were our senior year, when we still felt love and affection towards the younger members of the Cleftos, but ultimately felt an indifference and detachment to our situation - and much more enticed by the idea of joining the alumni in what lay beyond all we knew?

I imagine there's parallels between the two. The nature of life is flux, not permanence. If pain comes from attaching yourself to the things in this world that are inevitably going to change, then does that make our indifference valid, or wise, or correct? Does it mean we are right, in our twilight years - whether it be the last semester of college, or on the cusp of death - to look upon all that we are about to leave behind with a sense of abandon? Or completion?

Does it mean that none of us ever truly love the ones who come after to the degree by which we loved the ones who came before?