I’ve been back in Ballyvaughan for a little over a week now. The readjustment has been difficult and strange and I don’t feel completely at home again. The abscense of ten of the most wonderful people I’ve had the opportunity to know is palpable and the atmosphere here is not the same as it was in Autumn. It never will be, I know, but I was hoping it would be. It’s not bad or worse or negative at all, I’m just still trying to figure everyone out.

This term there are 31 undergraduates, including myself and Rona. That’s twenty-nine new people to get used to, twenty-nine new people to work with and around and play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s more undergrads now than there were total students last term. I’m so happy to share this experience with so many people, but I hope that each of them can get as much out of it as I have so far. There’s so much beauty and goodness in the land and the people in this community, and I pray that doesn’t go unnoticed or overlooked.

It’s interesting to think about how the decisions and actions of one person can alter another person’s path and outlook so significantly. Over Christmas break, I was supposed to spend a couple weeks in Germany with one of my very best friends. I ended up coming home (Washington) at the last minute to attend the memorial service of someone that I had been incredibly close to. I got a call Christmas Eve morning that he’d passed away. I couldn’t process any of my emotions for days- I’m still having trouble now. I flew home on my twenty-first birthday and had my first legal drink on American soil in his honour. Instead of celebrating my birth, I spent the following day trying to celebrate his life.

Jack was a complicated man, and I won’t try to pretend like I was the only person who knew that. I will say that he did spend most of his short, intense life with more pain in his heart than I think any of us could ever comprehend. I hope now that he has found the calm and comfort he was searching for.

So, rest peacefully, Jack. We miss you. I miss you. And, I’m sorry.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May not fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

“Birches”, Robert Frost

John Wharton Hazard, III
April 5th, 1988 - December 14th, 2011