Commentary: When I was little, and my parents had to explain things that happened before I came along, they amused themselves by referring to it as B.C. — Before Cassie. When they watched the moon landing, when Sweden had a moment with ABBA, and when everyone wanted hair like someone named Farrah Fawcett — this was way back in B.C.
It was a family idiom that let us distinguish a clear line in our lives. Another clear line for my family's chronology was drawn when my dad died.
After the immediate pain, more grief came in waves at later moments, during key life events. There's grief in the empty chair at my wedding. It's in never being able to ask him what he'd want my children to call him. It's him never seeing that I did what he wanted, that I worked with my mind for a living instead of my hands. I'd remember how, when he would tell me this, I couldn't look him in the eyes, but I'd stare at his fingers, gnarled with unchecked arthritis.
His death wasn't something any of us planned for my future, but the story of how it could be if he were alive haunts my life. He comes up at every video I see of women getting walked down the aisle and every video where a baby is lifted into a craggy man's arms who is trying to hide his tears.
This millennial generation is similarly rolling with the grief of a lost future through small realizations. We were told what our future should look like — some from TV and some from privileged adolescence — but have a vastly different experience in living it. There is burnout from COVID-19, but there is also underlying grief for a future we may not see for ourselves or our children.
It's grief alongside a couple's frustration when an out-of-town company buys their apartment and repeatedly raises the rent, which cuts into their ability to save for a down payment. It's when the responsible woman puts off having children because she needs to pay off a student loan she locked in at 18 that ended her chance to be a mom. It's when a man decides that he'll pay the light bill this month and cut his insulin in half for the next four weeks. It's a young mom explaining to their kids what an oil spill does to an ocean.
Of course, there are no guarantees for upward mobility beyond the sweat of your brow, and even then, it could fail. But if this is the greatest country like we claim, how do we implement the systems to push us toward success instead of putting us into stasis? So many things needlessly cripple us as we come out of the gate — like student loans — or stanch our budding growth, like medical debt.
Our path to adulthood was romanticized. There was no discussion on an ebb and flow of good and bad times in history; we were told we'd be living in the lights of the shining city on the hill. None of us knew how littered our lives would be with events that knocked us down. So, when we stare into the distance before we get up and go again, give us a minute to process the grief that comes in waves behind all these once-in-a-lifetime events that weren't in our fairy tales.
Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She is also the Executive Director of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.