Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

She had learned that unasked questions were more dangerous than unanswered ones.

Cady had learned that the family of a suicide victim doesn’t get straight sympathy. Every “I’m sorry for your loss” that they received came with a look of curious judgment, the unsaid “How could you let this happen?”

You scared? Good. Use it. Fear makes you strong.

“Innocence is not the same as stupidity.”

She noticed how easy it was to edit someone’s past so that all the pieces of a person fit neatly together. Simple narratives were easier to tell, to teach, to understand, to remember. The lie endures for generations, while the truth dies with its victims. But what were the consequences?

Legacy is different from fate. I chose to inherit his legacy, and I’m choosing to carry it onward. Fate implies you have no control. I admit, choice can be a burden, it would be a load off to think the future’s already set. But I don’t believe anything is written in the stars. I want to write it myself.

I want you, too, but, we make choices, we hope they’re the right ones. It’s the best we can do in this life.

She could learn the lessons of Bilhah, that trauma does not define us, our love does, and that the story of our future is ours to write. And Whit, who carried the burden of his father’s legacy but never forgot the choice was his. And Robert, that to judge ourselves in hindsight will never be fair, or proper scientific method. She could see her life better for having seen theirs.

So look around. Be grateful for every new perspective you encounter on this campus. Listen to the voices around you, however dissimilar to your own. Make up your own mind, forge your own path, your life is your own.

Now she understood that we must love people whom we cannot control, in fact, we are lucky to love and be loved by people we cannot control. If we could control the person, love wouldn’t be a gift. This was the uncertainty of life, and of death. It was what made life beautiful and terrifying at once. It was the state of grace.

But home didn’t mean a perfect place with only good memories, it meant a place where you grew up.