A Card and a Column

I didn't go to my great-uncle's funeral. I would have liked to have gone, but as 2 p.m. approached last Tuesday, I was sitting in the Eliot dining hall, staring out of the window rather than walking by Horeb church or driving into Bedford, Virginia.

My family was there. I talked to them on the phone. They were calm, supporting one another; my great aunt told me things would hit her later--when she was home alone. But Grandma and Granddaddy, assorted aunts and uncles were there then. It was okay.

But I cannot say without guilt that I failed to pay the final respects to a man who watched over me from childhood and with whom I shared a special love. I did not do my duty.

This is not the kind of information with which you burden strangers. I recognize the self-indulgence in writing it. Even in telling my friends why I was grumpy or having a bad week, there was a minute calculation. How to say it, how to shrug one's shoulders. How to elicit their concern without their pity, and then assure them that it really is okay, so as not to break up the conversation. It is not that my friends are uncaring. It's not even that strangers are cold. They simply do not know the part of me that has been hurt.

The problem of Harvard, for many students, is the problem of distance. We are physically far from home. Virginia, California, Hong Kong--my theory is that once home is over half a day's drive or $200 worth of flights it no longer matters. We are simply physically incapable of being part of the daily or weekly rhythms of our families, sometimes even spreading to such a distance that we miss the great milestones in the cycle of family.

But more than just the physical distance, there is a mental separation that grows from the time one enters Harvard. A wall is not the only thing to cordon off the Yard. I didn't know that Uncle Louis was dying--at least no more than he had been for the past 10 years--until he was gone. It's not that I fulfill some stereotype, caught up in my papers and projects. The subtle hints that are the fluency of familial conversation are lost over the phone. Quivering hands far away are not observed when fingers move to write a letter. But more importantly, Harvard has a gravity, a force that pulls one into campus and away from outside thoughts and considerations.

The minute workings of this mental distance can be seen at work today, Monday, the proverbial morning after of Junior Parents Weekend. Somewhere around one-quarter of the school has just met their friends/roommates/significant other's parents or (scarier still) re-met their own parents.

The mental distance manifests itself not just in the generation gap but in the connection dwindling between old faces, old places, our old centers of gravity. Whereas my first year I was delighted to know that the sister of my brother's high school shop teacher told my mother to tell me "hi," now the reference arouses not just my nostalgia but also my fear of forgetting names.

The distance is a divide that grows in our identities. We value different ideas, different places and different people. By junior year, we are firmly rooted in Harvard community--admittedly an amorphous concept, but the Houses, extracurricular organizations and friends form our spheres of orbit. The time at the Institute of Politics, Holworthy's basement or the Murr Center becomes as much a part of us as anything else. While I once identified myself as a Southern girl, now my family tells my I talk funny (i.e. Northern). And while I harassed my Uncle Louis for yet another silly story, now I do not even attend his funeral.

Yet our whole personalities can never really fit into the four-year box that we are given. Since my great-uncle passed away I realized that I have been speaking with more of a southern twang, as if I'm trying to impress upon my friends that I'm not just here in Cambridge--there is more than meets the eye.

Ultimately, we are only here for four years. Whatever community or identity we form is fluid, pushed out after Commencement and dispersed back across the nation and the world. Granted, we may emerge with a handful of lifelong friends, a rolodex of useful business acquaintances, and maybe--if we are lucky--a partner for life. But the person next door to you in your first year will not, in all likelihood, be the person next door to you in 50 years. Just as we are close together now, the same distance that plagues our families will someday plague our relations with one another.

So I write a card to my great aunt, a column to my friends, and try to do by proxy the duty that distance prohibits me from doing in person.

Erin B. Ashwell '02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.