Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! Facta est quasi vidua domina gentium; princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo.
How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. (Lamentations 1:1).
How lonely sits the campus that was once full of people. The bustle of Cornell so quickly gives way to an empty, eerie silence. The libraries that once held more students than could be counted, all anxiously reviewing for finals, now sit empty. And we, the graduating class of 2024, sit with them. We stand amidst ghosts, the whispering memories of four years, as we become ghosts soon, ourselves.
Just when you think Cornell has run out of ways to torture you, it cooks up a new emotionally debilitating experience. In this case: saying goodbye. How ironic it is that someone (like yours truly) who spent so long lamenting this place – the past four years, to be exact – is now equally mournful to leave– for good.
For so many years, I counted my best friends among those younger than me. The Class of 2024, robbed of its senior year of high school and freshman year of college, never bonded in the same way that other class years have. A not-insignificant number of us first set foot on campus the same day as the class of 2025.
And now, days after finals, the last of the undergraduates have left Cornell University. The campus sits alone, with only seniors roaming the once-bustling halls and buildings, some filled with joy and others overcome with sorrow.
Why is it so hard to say goodbye?
I left Syracuse Monday morning, having dropped off my best friend at the airport for the last time. The last of so many trips to that city up north, of so many thousands of miles spent with me in the driver’s seat and him right beside. As we crossed through the green plains bisected by Interstate 81, the weight of finitude finally hit me. It’s over. So long did I want Cornell to end, but so little did I realize what it really meant for Cornell to end.
For four years, you sit in the trenches and fight to make it through. You fight the weather, your classes, clubs, the administration, and – sometimes, it seems – even life itself. It is a never ending battle to the end at Cornell, a battle to the death or to the diploma. The men with whom you enter the foxhole come out as something different entirely, something wholly uncaptured by the word ‘friend.’
You take on the world every day at Cornell University. You spend four years conquering college, one brutal prelim after another. There are good days and really, really bad ones, but you get through it with each other. Cornell is always in motion. From one class to the next, one club to the next, juggling a dozen obligations all to come out on top and secure post grad success. You can never slow down at Cornell, you can never take a break, you can never stop. You move, constantly and unendingly, towards death or towards the diploma.
Then one day, all at once, it all comes to an end. The last exam, the last paper. Submitted and done. At last you are finally free… right?
Then, one by one, the undergraduates drop like flies. You watch so many close friends leave Ithaca, to return but without you. The undergraduates will return, we will not, and yet it is us who remain. The seniors are stranded, wandering the lonely city.
For a week. Just a week. Then we are set loose on the world to fight, unendingly, once more. This time though, we are set loose to brave the cold all on our own.
Why is it so hard to say goodbye?
A farewell to Cornell is not so difficult; the university will always stand here. We will always have the gorges and lake, the clock tower and Arts Quad. Cornell can be a brutal place, and saying goodbye is what we seek all these years. It’s what many undergraduates say to us, on their way out of the town to return again in the Fall: how lucky we are to get out for good. But how much we once longed to leave is easy to forget in these days of wistful remembrance, with the warmth and light of the sun sending us off.
“I’m so glad I’m leaving this wretched place,” my friend said to me as we drove through Collegetown one last time. So – I thought – would I be. Then, now, six days before leaving, I finally realized how much I do not want to leave. Or rather, how much I want to come back again in the Fall. How much I want to, once again, walk along the slope with those people I fought these years with, discoursing about those grand ideas. How much I want to argue late into the night with my friends about those most eclectic of undergraduate fascinations.
But I will not come back in the Fall. Yet so many undergraduate friends will.
It is – of course – nostalgia. Conveniently absent the rigors of an Ivy League university, and finally with the natural beauty of this place on full display, the graduating class of 2024 is left to pace campus wondering why, only now, could they finally see.
Why is it so hard to say goodbye?
Because, all at once, we are on our own. Those men with whom we faced these years are gone. Bonded together by the blistering cold of an elite university, you leave a part of yourself when you leave Cornell. Not for the university, but for those within it. And so, even after fulfilling our ostensible purpose here and finding employment, even after heading off to supposedly bigger and better things, the sorrow of loss threatens to eclipse the joy of opportunity.
We have fought the good fight, we have finished the course, we have kept the faith, but at what cost? For far too many of us, Cornell took everything we had to offer; it took everything we had and left us with nothing. Who am I without all of this; without Cornell?
Why is it so hard to say goodbye?
I did not have the words in Syracuse on Monday morning. The only noises I could summon to tell the people who left in the past week were: “thank you, for everything.”
How completely inadequate. To these men and women who dragged me through the past four years in one piece, to these men and women who helped me survive the frozen tundra known as Ithaca, NY– how do I say goodbye?
I could have written pages upon pages of lamentations about the state of Cornell University, higher education in general, and the traumas suffered by my community. Indeed, I began to do exactly that. Yet in this twilight of my time at Cornell, I find myself wanting – more than anything else – to go back and do it all over again. Differently, for sure, but do it nonetheless.
After everything – after the best, worst four years of my life – I only want just one more night around the table with the people I love.
I know it always had to end, and I am grateful beyond measure to Almighty God that it ended in the way that it did, but I still ask whenever I wake up in these last days: why is it so hard to say goodbye?
So here we go.
Goodbye Cornell Catholic. To the staff and students who frequent the ground floor of Anabel Taylor Hall: thank you. Thank you for so many hours of banter and levity. For providing a haven for a confused junior excised from his once-close friends to do it all over again. For the Sacraments and propagating the Faith on a campus that desperately needs the light of Christ.
Goodbye, Review. Thank you to all of the readers who have stuck with us through these years, undoubtedly the most turbulent in recent memory for our alma mater. To Sam, above all, who saw something in me sophomore year and encouraged me to write. For providing a place that I could work through my thoughts in print, which is something I will dearly miss.
Goodbye, CRs. This one hurts; after we rebuilt the thing from death’s door last summer, it’s more difficult than I care to admit to watch my successors run where I merely walked. And yet, I’m so happy for and proud of the new leadership team. Enzo, Max, Fati, Nick, Eben, and Nikolai: good luck and thank you for everything. To the outgoing board as well, I cannot express my gratitude. Especially Victoria, thank you for keeping me sane.
Goodbye, CSGT. What a blessing it was, even if only for a year, to drive up to Syracuse all those weeks and together assist at the altar of God. After three long years at Cornell, I finally found my home. In these days, walking around campus remembering what was and lamenting what could have been, by far the most common refrain is how much I wish I had more time with you all. Not often enough do I fall on my knees and thank God for finding friends like you. I love you all and will miss you more than I can put into words, so I will simply say: au revoir.
Well then, why is it so hard to say goodbye? Because it all meant so much. If Cornell gave us nothing, if our four years here were spent exclusively in stilted examination of dusty old books, leaving would be easy. But no, leaving hurts because we leave something – and someone(s) – that mattered.
What precious little comfort that is, now, as the image of a clock tower shrinks in the rearview mirror. Yet in a little while, maybe a month or maybe a year, we’ll be happier for the four years we spent on the Hill. So goodbye, Cornell, until we meet again.
