There’s a tradition at Brown that changes the way you see the world. As first-years, to mark your entry into the university, you’re led in a procession through the Van Wickle Gates at the front of campus and into your life as a college student. Then, at graduation four years later, you retrace your steps in reverse, passing through the same gates back out into the city of Providence as the school releases you into adulthood.

It’s not walking out of the gates that’s unforgettable—it’s what’s waiting on the other side. Few graduating seniors know what to expect; those of us who’ve experienced it tend to hold our tongues, maybe because we know that a description will never live up to what it’s like in the moment. Just wait, we might say. You’ll see. 

Because when you take that symbolic leap beyond the boundaries of campus, you land, quite literally, in the arms of a community so powerful it knocks the breath from your lungs. Thousands of alums line the streets to welcome you into the fold. There are so many screaming, ecstatic adults, from recent grads to those clutching walkers and canes, that whatever feelings you might be gripped by in the moment—grief for the end of your college years, terror of the unknown—are blasted away, replaced by a pure and stunning kind of joy. As you pass through a tunnel of smiling faces, exchanging cheers and high fives and greeting strangers like family, the message is clear: you may be leaving the comfort of college, but you’re far from alone.

Those same gates are piled high with memorial flowers this week, after a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall on Saturday afternoon. Two students were killed—19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov—and nine more were injured. As videos of a suspect, still at large, circulate online, my attention has stayed locked on........

© Time