I thought there would be a moment.
Not a party, I was not asking for a party, I know how institutions feel about the people who leave, there is a certain efficiency to the disappearance, a relief on both sides that no one names out loud. I was not asking for streamers or a speech or even a cake. But I thought there would be a moment. A handshake at minimum. An acknowledgement that I had been there.
I packed my office in an afternoon.
Twenty-five years into fourteen boxes and three trips to the car and a walk down the hallway with a trolley and no one in the hallway and the fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light always does, indifferent, buzzing faintly, illuminating without warmth.
Someone had taped a card to my door. Signed by six people. A gift card to a bookstore, fifty dollars, because what do you give a woman who spent her career surrounded by books and now you are giving her back the books as though they are a consolation prize for the years she spent building something that will continue without her name on it.
I said thank you. I meant it. I drove home.
I want to tell you that I was fine. I was, mostly. The grief was not for the institution. The institution had made its feelings clear over twenty-five years in the small ways institutions make their feelings clear, through what they fund and what they don’t, through whose name goes on the award and whose goes on the course shell, through the door that opens for some people and stays narrowly ajar for others.
The grief was for the version of me who arrived the first time believing that if she worked hard enough the door would open all the way.
She deserved a better goodbye than fourteen boxes and a fifty-dollar gift card.
She deserved someone to say: we see everything you did here. We see what it cost you. We are sorry it took so long for you to know that your leaving would leave a shape.
I drove home and put the boxes in the hallway and made tea and sat in my chair and outside the window the trees were doing what trees do in October, releasing what they no longer need, slowly, without apology, gold and red and gone.
I thought: I have something to learn from that.
