Extra Credit

Graduation photos are often full of emotion. The best ones capture that moment when a graduate’s face reflects joy, relief, excitement about the future, satisfaction, sadness about a chapter ending, gratitude to all those who helped clear a path for that walk to the stage to collect a diploma.

Maybe it’s projection, the photos from the recent graduations, featured in these pages, seemed even more full of emotion than usual. There was the look of absolute elation on the face of Ella Dunathan at the Westhampton Beach commencement that graced the front page of the Western Edition of The Southampton Press. The hug that Pierson graduate Juliana Barahona shared with a friend on the Express. Many, many more photos of 2021 graduates from all over the South Fork.

It could be that the entire community is happy to have something to celebrate, having come through more than a year of catastrophe. It might well be that this year’s graduates — as well as the Class of 2020 — deserve extra credit for enduring a homestretch of high school that was unlike any other before them. Just getting to the end of the worst of the pandemic, at about the time the tassels were being moved from one side to the other, was something to celebrate.

High school is hard enough — the classes of 2020 and 2021 lost so much, and they had plenty of reason to give up. This past week, their perseverance was rewarded, and the celebrations began. (One thing the Class of 2021 got that the Class of 2020 didn’t: safe graduation parties, with friends and families.)

It’s too soon to consider the pandemic in the past, fully. But the graduations offered a milestone that allows for those tiny explosions of happiness that have felt sealed up for more than a year. So many of those teenagers let out full-throated cries of cheer, and it allowed all of us a moment or two to remember what real life can feel like without a shadow hanging overhead.

Congratulations to the Class of 2021, a group of young people who endured and adapted, and now will go on to do great things in life — and thank you for letting us all share in that moment of exuberance. We all needed it.