Finding Closure at My Late Husband’s 50th College Reunion

“You didn’t go to your reunion, but you’re going to his?” my younger daughter asked, perplexed.

Yes, it was a little weird, I admit, going to my dead husband’s 50th college reunion. I had gone to my tenth, when I still remembered names and faces. But then adulting, as my children call it — marriage, career, children, house — got in the way.

But with my husband’s death from cancer in 2021, I felt like I had been catapulted back in time to the person I was at 25, the age when I met him. What if I had never taken that turn in the road? Who would I be? Who am I without him? I thought I knew the future, but now I didn’t, and I felt off balance.

In a brief foray into therapy I had explained all this to the therapist and asked her how people in my situation figured out what their future would be. After a thoughtful pause, she replied: “The future … reveals itself.”

Could it reveal itself at my husband’s reunion?

It was not the first time I had thought of going to a reunion as a kind of therapy. A couple of years ago, I planned to go to my 45th reunion. But I chickened out before the deadline for a refund, not ready to face so many people I no longer knew, or no longer knew well.

It was easier to do it for someone else. Standing in for my husband felt like a mission. He would have wanted to go, to reconnect with his past.

I was invited to attend by Betsy Sullivan, a fellow journalist and a member of the Yale College Class of ’74, like my husband, Josh Barbanel. She had not known him — or me. But she had been drafted to write his obituary for the reunion, and had cleverly turned his bike riding into a metaphor for his adventurous spirit and creativity. She told me I could attend the memorial service, and the whole reunion, as a bereaved spouse.