Endings nearly always feel anticlimactic to me. In movies, when Darcy proposes to Lizzy and shatters her perception of him and herself, the music swells and the rain falls and she stares in the mirror for hours at a time. It’s a moment of turmoil and change, and it is the end of her life as she expected it to be.

But to me, endings have always been quiet, the death of life as I knew it fading with an intangible hiss into the night. I have moved continents and I have graduated in the midst of a pandemic, amongst other things, and yet, I woke up the mornings after and still needed to make myself breakfast. The music didn’t swell. The rain didn’t fall. I do not have a large, ornate mirror to wonder into.

Calvin doesn’t host a ceremony for its winter graduates, and that sounded just about right to me. Of course the trumpet wouldn’t sound on December 19, 2024, as I walked out of my last exam. The cars would sit there in the CFAC parking lot, unblinking and unadorned as they always do, and I would trudge between them, leaving a place I had adored for two and a half years.

Of course. Even my college years could not end cleanly. They would fade out like a smudge between this year and the last, and any beginning that might follow—a job or graduate school—would hover, intangible, for weeks after the maroon and gold paint ran out.

To me, endings have always been long and drawn out, and I carry the after effects of each small death with me in the hidden places underneath my skin like ice in a snowdrift. If there is a trumpet sounding, it is because I have played it for myself. The audience needs to make themselves breakfast and shovel their driveways in the morning, and anyway, they do not know how to play the trumpet.

So as my time at Calvin drew to a close, I waited for the quiet hiss of release to begin playing in my ears, for the melancholy to begin to set in my snowdrifts. The snow began to fall, mushy and warm, in early December and great icicles formed and melted in the corners of the CFAC roof. I had conducted my first cultural and rhetorical research here. I grew as a teacher and a learner here, and the barista who worked at Peet’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday knew my name and coffee order.

When I turned in my last college paper—a linguistics paper for Professor Johnson—my husband greeted me with a long hug, a sweet kiss. “You’re done,” he whispered. I laughed him off, citing the three finals I still needed to pass and my last full day of classes, but a little trumpet sounded out of my melancholy.

When I came home from my last lecture, he kissed me again. Another (little) trumpet sounded.

So it continued, coupled with a Rhetoric Center staff goodbye dinner and sweet messages from my parents. Little celebrations between finals, and shoveling the sidewalk, and eating breakfast.

My last final was on a Thursday, and the snow was brown slush and I finished the exam quickly. As I handed it in, the professor, a woman I would consider a friend and research mentor, whispered, “You’re done!” and had me pose for a photo: a little trumpet. Around me, the rest of my class, an all-girls Intro to Linguistics course populated with friends or Rhetoric Center regulars, noticed the little celebration. And to my amazement, reader, the whole class clapped for me as I walked out of the room.

It is now January, and the snow has fallen fresh and white every day this week. I have poured what I could into blooming maroon and gold for two and a half years, and I am grateful to those who sounded their trumpets for me in the middle of their own daily lives. It is the first ending that has not felt anticlimactic, and perhaps that is because there has been a little trumpet chorus along the way—my friends and family looking up from their shovels and exams because they love me enough to do so.

But I think this ending feels less anticlimactic for another reason. Winter has felt harsh to me my whole life, with its snow banks and icy roads and lack of color. But this year, I walked over the ice, snowflakes gathering on my eyelashes, the tips of my fingers white, saying goodbye to my university, and I understand now.

Soon, I will have a job, and I will hear back about graduate school, but on this January day, I couldn’t bloom if I wanted to. This year I am grateful for winter, for its prolonged ending of the cycle of the natural life of the year. I am grateful to hibernate for just a little while, to turn my mind from research and intense study to shoveling my sidewalk and making breakfast for my husband on Saturday morning. This ending will drift under my skin and change how I view my life, but it will do it slowly, under cloudy skies that drop, again and again, a white blanket to rest beneath.

Kate Wilmot

Kate Wilmot (’24) is a Grand Rapids resident who has found herself in the in-betweens of undergrad and post-grad life. She is an avid children’s fiction reader and a globally-minded cook who will feed anyone that walks in her door. You can find her losing to her husband in pickleball, weight lifting, or getting coffee with her mom.