Leadership Thought: Two Strangers Became Friends as They Shared Their Grief at a Bucknell Graduation Service

Dear Friends.

Over the weekend, my family and I attended a graduation service for my granddaughter who was graduating from Bucknell University. 

The day was chilly, and rain was predicted, and sure enough, shortly after the outdoor commencement began, rain started to fall. Some of us who were unprepared for the rain moved inside to one of the classrooms where the service was being streamed.

As I stood inside the classroom watching the service, a woman asked if she could borrow a phone charger from my daughter. She and I made contact, and we began talking. She had been the head women's basketball  coach at Bucknell for 18 years, and was now retired, and she was also present for her granddaughter's graduation.

Because of my time coaching basketball, I was immediately interested in knowing more about her experience. 

Since it would be another hour before my granddaughter would walk across the stage to receive her diploma, I beckoned her outside the classroom where we could talk while she was waiting for her phone to charge. 

For the next ten minutes, we talked about Bucknell, her coaching experience, women's basketball, and then our discussion turned to family. 

She told me about her family and how she was caring for her mom and her dad, who had dementia, and I shared a little about our family and how I had lost my wife after a seven-year battle with Parkinson's. Immediately I could sense that there was a bond formed between the two of us. 

As I related my story of being a caregiver for my wife, I could see tears welling up in her eyes, and the next thing I knew, we were both standing in the hall outside the classroom crying. 

Grief is like that. There is no way you can predict when it will come and how you will manage it, and when it erupts between two people experiencing it, and immediate bond is often fashioned. 

There is something about the sharing of mutual grief with another that results in  the formation of a friendship. Once complete strangers, a bond of friendship is formed that enables them to become immediate friends. 

It has been written that "Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can, and common suffering is a far stronger link than common joy." Alphonse Marie de Pratt de la Martine

Just a chance meeting between two people who will probably never see each other again- I don't even remember her name- but for a few minutes outside a classroom on the campus of Bucknell two strangers became good friends as together we shared our common grief. 

On that cold and rainy day in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I learned the truth that "To weep is to make less the depth of grief." William Shakespeare

Yours in faith and friendship

Tom