Dearest Mom and Dad,

Didn’t I always say I would never want to live in New Jersey in the summer? Are you laughing now? How many things have I said I would never do, or never want to do, and done them nonetheless? It’s getting hot and humid here, as Dad already knows; he always checks the weather wherever I am.

At long last, I have a weekend at home. I’ve made every effort to clear this Saturday morning to write to you both about Reunions, in particular, the Friday. Two weeks ago.

I’d just come back from Providence for G’s final sculpture exhibition on Wednesday, leaving before dawn on Thursday and beating all the east coast traffic home in record time (3 hr, 45 min) to New Hope. Mom, you taught me by example to be a road warrior.

I worked a full Thursday in the office, and showed up briefly on Friday to make sure everything was under control.

Speaking of weather, all signs were for cool, rainy days. I got a new pair of wellies, and wound up wearing them all day Saturday. I also got a room on campus, in case I wanted to stay up late.

First thing when I got into town, I juggled getting things placed for my class responsibilities, finding my room, and getting the car situated (first briefly on Nassau St, second long-term in what we called lot 23, but I swear I heard the students call lot 20. You would remember it, way at the bottom of the hill, where I parked my car during the year.)

My responsibility was to chair the memorial committee, which primarily meant creating a service of remembrance for the twenty-two classmates we have lost since 1991, but also making table cards in their honor for the class dinner, and coordinating with the P-Rade committee to make signs to carry (they did all of the design and work themselves). Planning all of this started two years ago.

Every February, there is an enormous Service of Remembrance in the chapel, honoring all Princetonians who passed that year. For a while I have represented our class, and as I always say, I get flooded with gratitude for being one of the kids picked to attend our university. I think about everything you both did, actions large and small, of sacrifice and encouragement, of taking the long view, of letting me go when you might have wanted me to stay nearby. I think about how, one day, there was one less car in the driveway, which I learned later, paid for my schooling.

I also think about how four years of Princeton keeps giving returns in terms of new and old friendships and connections through volunteering and auditing classes. How life has not turned out the way I hoped in some ways, and how it has exceeded my expectations in others. The peaks of my life are almost all dipped in orange and black, pointing to Old Nassau. After each reunion, I find I want to replay each minute and savor it, like a sweet in my mouth, to make it last as long as possible (like that game we used to play, Mommy, on our road trips when I was little).

Over the past two years, I pulled together ideas for our class memorial service. From 92’s 30^th program (led by a friend I met in a Princeton Zoom during the pandemic) to snapshots on how ’90 honored their own last year, I added things from St John’s in my beloved funeral ministry and from my expanding heart as a poet (and admirer of fellow poets). To this I added my former training in interfaith ministry. I envisioned vast wide arms, as open as possible, to hold everyone who would walk through the door, be it few or many.

Oh, Mommy and Daddy! It was many. It was standing room only. In my welcome and in my farewell, I looked out at a sea of familiar faces, many of whom I hold dear. The Greeks have a word for it, philia, the purest love. Three faces in particular shone: to the left, the president of my club; to the right, an old friend (in our senior yearbook, you may recall us captured sitting on a window ledge); and to the far right, in an overflow room, someone who dated a pal of mine. There were countless others, but these three captured the whole natural fraternity of us all, in a single instant.

Later, I made a transcription of the service, but it lacks sound, an essential part. Four classmates made music for us: two cantors, a pianist, and an oboist. Lately, I have fallen in love with the oboe, partly due to the extraordinary oboe duet in Bach’s Mass in B Minor, partly because of its connection with the Good Shepherd, and partly simply because of my elegiac heart.

For our service, the oboe spoke the elegy; the piano held space for its pain; and the cantors sang, “the Lord is my shepherd… there is nothing shall I want… nothing shall I fear.” As a gift to myself, I asked them to deliver the Psalm 23 rendition I favor, which we use for funeral Masses. I had to ask our organist for the score.

In between the music of Bach’s Arioso, MacDowell’s To a Wild Rose, and Telemann’s Oboe Sonata, a classmate read “Litany of Remembrance” to which we responded, line by line, “We shall remember them.” Another classmate (a poet herself) read poet Andrea Gibson’s “Tincture,” about the soul missing the body after death, “tell me again about goose bumps. Tell me again about pain.” Then three classmates walked forward and called out the names of the twenty-two, one at a time, slowly, after which we opened the room for anyone who wished to speak.

Soon, it was time to go back to the party of life. Most left for the reception at the new art museum except a few who helped clean up; eventually it was just two of us. Finding the bin I stowed away (which I delivered to campus at dawn before work several days before reunions), I collected the tablecloths, the left-over programs, and the twenty-two candles; the prayer/intention basket (with pens for people to leave notes) and the angel pins with Psalm 91:11 (“For He will command His angels about you, to guard you wherever you go”); the banner of the twenty-two from our freshman “face book” (before there was FB); and the left-over crackers, cheese, and fruit. Plus a hat someone left behind.

I left the tulips and a thank-you note for the Princeton staff member who helped us coordinate it all, and whose office is in Murray Dodge, where we were.

Like the many events I have run since G was a little girl, we left the room like we found it, as if we had never been there at all. I was proud of that, as much as I was proud of the way the setting manifested from my mind’s eye, ever aware that it was you, Mom, who cultivated in me the beauty of presentation. The details. The colors. The ribbon. The care. The abundant love. All you. I remember admiring you, learning those details, making flower posies, using my best penmanship, setting the table with the good silver.

By this point on Friday afternoon, at the bitter end, I was on my own (the way I like it) for a quick prayer of thanksgiving. I put on my backpack, lifted the heavy full bin, after placing the covered left-over food on top, and walked out slowly. A classmate who helped me clean up circled back to check in, just as a guy, class of ’86 (heading the opposite direction) offered to help me. Joyfully, I accepted and led him to the art museum’s cloakroom. In gratitude, I gave him one of our angel pins, which he promptly put on his lapel.

Finally free of responsibility, I went to the outdoor reception, facing my old junior dorm, Dodd. The Tigerlilies were singing, and the bar was closed, but a classmate behind the bar snuck me a beer. It was 6PM or so. Having missed most of the reception, I was still thrilled to see many people, and at the end, found someone to help me lift my bin to our home reunion tent at Butler (which you would never recognize, a far cry from the Butler where I lived sophomore year).

Next, I dropped off the fruit and cheese for others to partake and assessed the long line for dinner. It occurred to me that maybe I should take my bin down to the car before dark. I grabbed one of the undergrads driving golf carts up and down Elm Street ferrying alums back and forth, asked for a lift to lot 23 and hopped in the way-back on the flatbed. (Who said I am not still twenty-one myself?)

The driver was willing to wait for me while I popped the bin in my car, and we zipped back to the tent. Mission accomplished, I found my friends at a high-top table near the bar, exhaled, and got a lovely glass of Cabernet with dinner (having missed the adult version) from the kids’ station: one chicken tender and plenty of yummy mac and cheese.

After that, we laughed and danced and drank and played. Just like the good old days. The band was great, which meant that we were inundated with youngsters, but there was a beer line just for our class and satellite classes (89, 90, 92 & 93), which kept us from complaining too much. The issue is evergreen: if we don’t have a good band, no one stays; if we have a great band, everyone comes!

At a point, the band stopped. The bar closed. I got a glass of water. We shut down the tent for the night. When I trudged up to my room, it was past 2AM.

The next morning — instead of going to the class photo — I went to see Sonia Sotomayor chat with some of her classmates celebrating their fiftieth. (Only fifteen years away for us, how could that be?!)

The Wawa, far sleeker than when you both last saw it, delivered me the necessary black coffee, breakfast sandwich and good greasy hash brown, which I ate at a picnic bench in front of McCarter. I had on my wellies and carried my umbrella, opening it off and on.

This was the second time I got to be in “Sonia”’s company (she said that’s her name at Princeton). The first was for She Roars a few years ago, and like I wrote then, I think of you, Dad, and your faith in all that is right and just. Sonia has this way of seeing the good in people even when she fiercely disagrees with them, just like you. You raised me with the same respect and capacity to see many sides of a complex issue, which serves me well, albeit sometimes making it difficult to see what chessboard move to make next in this game of life.

After Sonia, I went back to my room in the pouring rain and rested for a while. My room looked south on what little remains of green fields on campus. I kept the windows open so I could hear the rain and feel the cool winds. (Not standard reunions weekend weather at all!) In and out of sleep, I traveled back thirty-five years to the last time the three of us were here, packing up my room. I was just myself, your girl, learning to belong to herself. My friends, down the hall. You both, at the Nassau Inn. Minutes before my independent life began.

Savoring this liminal moment, I pushed off other plans.

Soon, it would be the P-Rade, rain or shine. I rallied. Sensing that I would want to sleep in my own bed that night, regardless of how the day unfolded, I packed my bags. I walked up to meet a ’90 friend, grabbed some take-away sushi and green tea (some things have improved since 1991!), and stood in line with ’90 next to Whig/Clio to watch the Old Guard begin.

Preparing to take a photo, I noticed something magical about where I was standing, facing over four-hundred of my classmates on the other side of the road, with Nassau Hall directly behind them, centered in each frame. The former capital building of our country, built between 1754-56, exactly two hundred years before the two of you met and married! The centerpiece of our campus. The centre that holds. (h/t Yeats)

As I cheered and snapped pictures, I got a text that abruptly changed my perspective. Your granddaughter. My girl. I retreated to a quieter place and listened.

Dad, among so many gifts, you taught me to listen. I tried to remember to keep quiet, to speak only when it was clear what to say. It is so hard to know what to say, how to help, how to ease her struggle.

Mom, what helped you when you felt this same pain, the sense that it’s all too much? I still hear you saying how hard it is to cope with this life.

What a contrast this was with the parade of orange and black parading by — to hear my child questioning her existence. What should I do? What could I say?

Mommy, Daddy, God. Help me.

After calming down, G apologized for calling, but I insisted I was grateful she called instead of hurting herself. I would never have forgiven myself if she hurt herself when I was in my happy place, if she refrained from calling to preserve my happiness for a few hours [only to ruin it later].

We hung up, but I felt shaken, unable to figure out what to do. Like I used to feel when you, Mommy, said the same things.

I felt my familiar walls of protection rise around me. I was glad I had packed my suitcase. I told myself I could leave. Go home. Lick my wounds. Instead, an act of serendipity: a ‘92 friend texted and found me, not knowing why I was sitting away from the crowd. Her expertise is grief counseling. An epiphany: among other things, G is grieving. Soon, she will leave grad school at RISD, the first place she has felt accepted.

I wanted to call G back and say, RISD will stay with you, just like Princeton stays with me. (Later, I do.)

Once again, I rallied, but tenderly. First I put my suitcase in the car and walked to the street. Later, I returned my room key and someone else’s key (’76) so she could get on the train sooner.

Mom, you taught me to do small kind deeds. When I feel adrift, they help buoy me.

With added energy, I went to Vigil Mass at the Chapel, back to the street, and then home after dinner, the sun setting, the rain finally over.

Throughout the weekend, many classmates said how much they valued the memorial service. One said it was a highlight for her, and another introduced me to her daughters as the soul of our class. Not sure that is true, but I sure wanted to share it with you. What is true is I believe my purpose was to create that hour, to bring an imagined service to life, to ask our classmates to participate, to allow the Holy Spirit to be in our midst, to open our arms as wide as possible to reach and include every soul, especially those already departed.

Part of the enormity of reunions is the suspension of time and the invitation to go back to the place where we were all young with the same sweet company, amid the same beautiful buildings. With the same scents, many of the same pathways and benches and tap rooms. A sensory overload, it feels as fully alive as one can be.

And those who are no longer with us, like you two, get to come back, too.

I would stop here and send this, were it not for what happened next.

I went home, back to work, and up to Providence for graduation. G got hooded and walked with her class of nine and received her MFA in Sculpture.

The sun came out. Her smiles those days were radiant.

Her dad helped her pack up her apartment, and we both helped pack up her studio. She did her final errands and packed up her thesis sculpture on her own, before coming to me in New Hope, and then on to Ohio to sort out her next steps. There is no question this will be a hard transition. Please pray for her.

Ah, I miss you both. Know that your love guides me every day of my life.

Always,
Cressey

PS: I still read your letters.

Dad, the last one you sent was in 1993.

Mom, the last you sent was an email in 2014, although you still sent cards, often with a few dollars for a “free” latte.