Haverford College Class of 2014

Spoleto: chamber music, Shakespeare’s Pericles, a Cuban big band, and an all-male dance company of Algerian, Israeli, and Palestinian street dancers. We drove the nearly 1000 miles down to Charleston in one day, stopping only for gas and a short supper. We took a leisurely four days to drive home, stopping for lunch with good friends in Richmond, and supper and an overnight stay at my brother Steve’s in Bethesda. Friday and Saturday we were at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College (a mile away), Philly, and then drove to Manhattan for a vegan meal with R'el. We spent Saturday evening and Sunday morning with Peter and his family, then headed home.

We stopped at Haverford College for David’s fifth college reunion. At 23, he was the oldest freshman at Haverford in 2010. We know this because he told us, with a chuckle, that the dean, at a meeting of the whole freshman class, had listed interesting facts about the incoming class (how many international students, etc.). The youngest student was 16, the oldest 23. He studied Chinese and Spanish and biology and chemistry. Then he joined the Army in 2011, became a medic, and got leukemia in 2014, a few months before his Haverford class graduated.

Last year, at my Bryn Mawr College 40th reunion, Jim conceived a plan of attending David’s 5th reunion and having a short memorial for him. Jon Schweitzer-Lamme, chair of the Haverford Class of 2014 reunion committee, knew David, it turned out, and was happy to organize it.

Stacie Giles, my dear friend in Richmond, and her husband, Frank, came too. She was going to her own 40th reunion at Bryn Mawr. Stacie's short-story murder mystery was recently published in an anthology, Deadly Southern Charm.

We arrived Friday evening and went out to dinner with Natalie, a good friend of David’s at Haverford. They studied Chinese and Spanish together and annoyed/amused their friends by speaking Chinspanglish. David was a very private person and I don’t recall him ever talking about his friends. We first knew of Natalie when she walked up our driveway to attend the visiting hours in our home before David’s funeral. She and David had emailed all through his illness and she followed my blog. It was a bold thing for her to come up from New York unannounced, but I was thrilled to learn of her friendship and connection to David and immediately invited her to sit with our family at the funeral.

We spent dinner talking about David and about her present life. Then we drove to Haverford and sat under a big reunion tent between Founders Hall and the old Ryan gym, where I used to practice fencing with the Haverford team. (Bryn Mawr didn’t offer fencing. I had learned it at the YMCA in high school. Since Haverford was all-men at the time, I couldn’t compete with the team  at meets, but occasionally got to compete unofficially with women from other colleges.)

The memorial was simple and intimate. Nine classmates stood in a circle near a young tree on Founders Green and talked about David. One woman remembered that David wouldn’t laugh at her jokes. They remembered being surprised that he was the famous 23-year-old: he didn't look that old.

After that sweet meeting, we took a short tour of Barclay first floor. David lived in room 102, the corner dorm room facing Founders Hall. Natalie lived on the same floor. I have fond memories of Barclay: some of my favorite Class of '78 Haverfordians lived in Barclay during our freshman year.

I wasn’t sure how the memorial would go, and how I’d feel about it. Would it be awkward, being the older, bereaved parents of a young man who had only attended Haverford one year? Would anyone but Natalie and Jon recognize David’s name? But it was a sweet experience. Bittersweet, to see these charming, promising young adults living interesting lives and returning to see college friends and roam the campus.

This week, all of eastern Massachusetts is resplendent with pink-lavender rhododendron shrubs. By far the most abundant color of rhododendrons right now, it blooms before the whites, reds, pinks, and oranges. The blessing of a cool (no, cold), rainy spring is that the flowering shrubs bloom for extended periods. The rhododendrons are a towering mass of bouquets of blossoms. Some are fifteen feet tall. It's a pleasure to drive around and enjoy them.