My high school class graduated in the mid-1980s, when the future was so bright we had to wear shades. I haven’t kept up with many classmates directly, but I still go to the reunions. They feel a bit like family gatherings in that even after five or ten years since we last met the conversations pick up with a familiar rhythm, as if we had just seen each other at the last holiday.
The other reason I go is that a high school class is an exclusive club that never admits new members, and over time its membership only declines. Showing up is a way of keeping track not just of people but of time itself.
The 40th reunion invite listed eleven of us who have passed. For a group of 300 American, college-educated professionals nearing 60, that’s right in line with actuarial expectations saying roughly 10–16 of us should be gone by now. And since I was very nearly number 12 on the list from a near-fatal bike accident just six months ago, I was more than happy to volunteer to make the “In Memoriam” poster that has our deceased classmates’ pictures and names, to be with us in spirit during the reunion.
Looking at those eighteen-year-olds (the poster uses the pictures from the yearbook), it’s hard not to pause and wonder… what happened?
The causes follow familiar patterns. A cluster of car accidents, mostly years ago. A few “died suddenly” in midlife, which usually means an undiagnosed heart condition or other health problem. One suicide. A couple of early aggressive cancers.
I didn’t know most of them well in school, but I remember one from the 20th reunion in 2006 when she was photographed smiling right next to me. She died in 2019 and will just be a picture on a poster this time.
The numbers suggest we’ll lose another ten or so by the 50th reunion. That’s how the curve works. And eventually, much further out, there will be no one left to keep the list. The tables suggest one or two of us might make it past 100, so the class won’t fully disappear until sometime around 2070, long enough that the world we shared at 18 will feel even more distant than it already does.
For now, we gather. Fewer each time, but still enough to recognize one another, to fall into old patterns, to share fragments of a common past that no one else quite understands.
And to look at the slowly growing poster to quietly note who is no longer in the room.