Reflections, Reunions, and Wrinkles

My ten-year COLLEGE reunion is next weekend.  We all graduated in May 2005.  I went to small, private, Catholic college, and I only graduated with about 190 other students, 80 with whom I spent 5 months on a tiny campus in Rome. We were all very close, and I will admit that by graduation I was ready to spread my wings, but I think that was due to some serious boy/"finding myself" drama.

I've been reflecting a lot going into this crazy reunion.  More than anything, I'm THRILLED to see everyone, pump some keg beer, sit around a campfire, and act 21 again.  Ok maybe not 21, but definitely not 32.  The boys are not coming (hubs either), so it's a me-night, which doesn't happen very often.  But there's also something else I'm feeling, something deeper, more empathetic, more "32" of me.

What I don't know is what so many of my friends have gone through in the last ten years.  I know that many have miscarried one, two, three babies.  I know that my roommate of 3.5 years lost two of her daughters in the most horrific car accident I can imagine, something I think about every single day of my life.  I know that at least one person has fought a major medical battle and won.  Will these things be evident? Will I notice this in their smile, or in the crinkles around their eyes or the wrinkles in their foreheads that weren't there ten years ago?

How do we wear our grief and our past? Some of it we push down so that it's only a spec, only visible if someone truly knows you or if the moment is *just* right.  But I also believe that some of it is always visible, in a smile that's not quite as bright as it used to be, in a conversation just a little less upbeat than it would have been ten years ago.  For some of us, grief and loss have changed us irrevocably.

We can't undo the past or the loss that has left its indelible mark on our hearts, on our faces, just like as hard as we may try, we can't undo the wrinkles with which time has marked us.  And as hard as we may pretend, we can't go back ten years to be the people that we were. I--for one--do NOT want to be that girl again anyway.

Ultimately, I won't know who has suffered.  I will see the old friends before me, and we will catch up. We will talk about babies (and I'm not exaggerating when I say that there are probably 100+ babies that have been born to my class over the past 10 years) and husbands and food and jobs, and all the things you talk about when you're filling in the blanks from F.book posts.  But we won't talk about grief, about loss.  It will be there, in a glance at a brand-new baby.  It will be there, in a turned-down smile.  It will also be there in the unspoken way we have all changed and grown up.  Like it or not, it has shaped us into these 32 and 33 year-olds we are now.

So we will sit around that campfire and sing the songs we did when we were 21, probably drink the same beer we did when we were 21, and pretend--just for a night--that we don't have so many wrinkles.