God may make you explain why you skipped your high school reunion

I had a brief crush on her in high school. Which, for me, meant I just kind of stared at her from across the room for half a semester during third period. I don’t think I ever said three words to her in my entire life. I did tell her dad she had died, though.

At the time, I didn’t even realize it was her. Up until that point she was “the cardiac arrest in room 38,” until it hit me square in my throat after I heard her name. I put the chart down, took a deep breath and slowly eased the door back open then softly closed it behind me as if I was trying not to disturb her. I gently pulled back the sheet from just under her eyes and brushed her hair from across her face hoping there was some mistake. There wasn’t. It was her … it was her. I briefly recall thinking that I wish I had spoken more than a few words to her in history class. I told her I was sorry that I couldn’t have helped and I left to tell her father the horrible news. Come to think of it, it may have been fourth period history class, if I remember it correctly.

For more than 25 years, I’ve been privileged to practice emergency medicine at a Level 1 trauma center just a couple miles down the street from my alma mater, North Central High School, class of 1982 ... GO PANTHERS. I graduated with more than 1,000 students. So, in many ways, since about 1990, I have been experiencing a high school reunion of sorts, caring for classmates, teachers and their families and countless others linked to that four-year expedition through adolescence. Blessed and humbled by the successes and sadly haunted at times by the failures, I’m still always amazed at how each of us change physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually as we age and how often I’m left thinking:

“I wish I had known them better in high school. I wish I had said more than a few words to them when we were kids.”

Some of us gloss over a reunion notice as nothing more than an invitation to some Friday night gathering we might attend if we are in town, but there is a reason why high school reunions evoke so much visceral emotion with so many of us. It is a four-year snapshot of the most formative, terrifying and confusing years of our lives. It is a one-acre photo riddled with imagery and emotion, heartbreak, elation, cattiness, anger, success, failure, friendship, loneliness and every single feeling that can rain down, like a Texas hailstorm, upon the frail head of a teenager. So much of it we would like to forget and so much more we in time hope we could hold on to forever. As those five and ten year milestones are reached, we quickly come to realize that no matter how worldly and self-aware we thought we were then, we didn’t know shit at sixteen, seventeen or eighteen. We were simply children in grown up bodies.

If I hand you a photo when you were 18, taken of yourself in sixth grade, perhaps just one of those ‘hanging around in the basement with a couple of friends’ kind of snapshots you’d probably say something like: “I can’t believe my mom cut my hair like that and sent me to school wearing that horrible sweater. I look awful.”

If I showed you that same picture when you were 20, a couple years of college or the military or life in the real world under your belt, you’d peer at it perhaps behind a hint of a smile and say, “Ikk…my hair, my teeth. I kind of liked that sweater though.”

If I showed you that photo when you were 40, you’d pause and look past it as if you were simply holding vapor and say to yourself: “My children are the same age as I was in this photo. My god we were young.”

If I showed you that picture when you were 50, you’d look at it, slowly caress the edges, sniff the paper, think about the friends in the photo and briefly try to recall the exact day it was taken, then slowly lay the picture back down and say to yourself: “Those were great friends to have as a kid; I wonder whatever happened to that sweater. I should call her, catch up.”

Now of course if I showed you that photo when you were 85, you’d look at it and say: “Those were damn fine clothes we wore back then, nobody appreciates good sweaters anymore, all that crap people wear now a days. No self-respect.” Trust me when I tell you that you would also be damn blessed if you could remember the names of the other people in the photo, too.

The snapshot is frozen but our eyes change minute to minute. Our experiences change how we view the world at any given time and that includes those kids you were "forced" to spend four years with, those kids you might have loathed, found petty or hated.

The reunion however gives you a chance to pass the photo around and see it with new eyes.

Most of us are keenly aware that there are horrible and heart-wrenching reasons one may never want to open those high school pages again, but even people who have experienced the worst imaginable tragedies in history — from crime to war to sickness — often eventually make it back to the place they escaped from and found themselves glad they did. Fortunately, very few of us carry that kind of emotional burden in regards to how we envision our high school years. And, if there are those in our class that do, then it behooves us even more to at least try to bring them back into the fold and make it right for them, offer them peace and closure and tell them: "We’re sorry, we should have acted differently."

Either way, each of us in a sense are stockholders of the history of a four year block of time, under one building, in one location, with one group of people who for better or worse shared a collective experience. It’s also a history that will fade with the final passing of the last graduate. Reunions help remind us of that we were just kids back then. In a way they allow us a chance to laugh at ourselves, forgive ourselves and more importantly forgive others.

So you “hated high school” and you “hated those kids” and you swore you’d never go back. Just go, even for a few minutes, say hello to one person you haven’t seen in 20 years. Say a kind word no matter how small, some fleeting memory you had of someone that for some reason stuck with you all these years. Perhaps tell a classmate you are sorry, give someone else the chance to say the same to you. Go in with the idea that maybe it’s not all about you, but about the collective "us" too.

In a world in which everything is recorded and archived, it’s kind of nice knowing that we create with our group memories this nostalgia sand castle built by each of our hands, then sit back and watch it sink back into the sea.

Most of us left high school with a bag of emotional pebbles and stood on the shore and tossed them into the water and said, “Goodbye, good riddance, to hell with all of you, I’m out of here.” We watched the ripples fan out across the water and fade to glass.

Perhaps this year, though, you go to the reunion. It’s a Friday night chance to pull the pebble from the water and see the ripples in reverse ... and just perhaps give you a chance to say a kind word or a simple hello to the boy or girl who you barely knew, and never spoke to, who sat across from you in history class.

Dr. Louis M. Profeta is an emergency physician practicing in Indianapolis. He is one of LinkedIn's Top Voices and the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God.

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