50th High School Reunion: A Reminder of Our Mortality

I am really looking forward to this August, when I plan to attend my 50th high school reunion at New Trier West High School in Northfield, Illinois. I went to the 10 year reunion and the 30th reunion too. But what makes this one so special is that it may be the last one most of our class will attend. Ten years from August, most of us will be 78 or 79 years old. The average life expectancy for American men is 73.5 years while for American women it is 79.3.

Indeed, at least 61 of our classmates have already died out of 765 students. Smiling photos of the deceased, taken for the school yearbook, when their whole lives were ahead of them, grace a section on the Classcreators.com site called In Memoriam.

My goodness, how time has flown by, with death going from a rare thing to something quite commonplace. I remember at the 10 year reunion, I heard about how Danny, a handsome guy I had a crush on, had disappeared in South America and was presumed dead. At the 30th reunion, I found out about a pretty and popular high school girl named Irene who had died of cancer. But now, coming up on the 50th high school reunion, it feels like we are passengers after the Titanic hit the iceberg, all knowing our time is almost up.

What people say now on this reunion site isn’t so much about their careers or what they have accomplished. We are past the need to impress. Rather, people write about how many children and grandchildren they have and how they miss a classmate or teacher who is already gone. It’s genuine and heartfelt.

My mother was an English teacher at New Trier and one of her students wrote a tribute to her after I registered for the reunion on-line. She said, “Hi Nancy. Your mother was my home room teacher. She was such a beautiful person and I truly loved her. I was so lucky to have her in my 4 years of high school!”

This was thoughtful and made me happy to hear that other people also loved my mother, who has been gone almost 20 years now.

A handsome high school football player and singer in high school musicals named John was mourned by a classmate with the following note: “Gone too soon! On the morning of John’s (or Johnny as I called him) memorial service on WGN radio, “Oh what a beautiful morning” was played, I thought at that time that it was a fitting song to hear, since he sung that as the lead in our high school musical, Oklahoma. To me it was a beautiful morning knowing he was in Heaven and that his life’s story would be a testimony of his Christian faith.”

A classmate named Holly was remembered by a classmate who once dated her. He wrote, “Holly was my high school sweetheart from sophomore year through graduation, and after for a semester at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She dropped out of U of I and pursued a career as a travel agent, something sparked by her family’s travels. She’d been to all 50 U.S. states before she graduated high school, and to most of Europe plus Russia and some of the Pacific islands before she died.

We broke up after she started working as a travel agent while I continued on at U of I. We both married other people, but I had some of idea of what was happening in her life since she went to the same church my mother attended.

Holly’s husband came home from work one day and found her dead of an apparent heart attack. Her doctor had always said her heart sounded funny, but they could never find anything definitively wrong.

When she died, Holly’s mom Helen told me, ‘Now she is with God.’

She was a very sweet person, much missed by everyone who knew her.”

As these tributes to the deceased remind us, we are only on this earth for a very short time. The main thing we leave behind are memories for those still living. Hopefully we have all lived our lives in such a way that those memories will be loving and positive.

In any case, while a 50th high school reunion can and should be a joyful celebration, it is also a forceful reminder of an undeniable truth: We will die one day too.