Thursday I said my goodbyes to the fourth group of eighth graders I’ve taught here in Greenville. I shook countless hands, gave numerous hugs, and reassured many crying students, all the while thinking how blessed I am to have such an honorable job.

I understood their pain. Endings are so painful when we’re young. Each transition is filled with such uncertainty, and like everyone, I’ve been through my share of painful transitions. In 1999, I was on the verge of tears as a friend drove me through the Polish village I’d called home for four years on the way to catch the train that would take me to Warsaw to catch a flight home. That longing all my students felt only briefly Thursday afternoon was so intense twelve years ago that it eventually led me back to Poland, back to the same village, back to the same students whom I’d left as freshman and returned to as seniors. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.

But I know the secret: we start again. Every ending is a beginning. Every chapter is followed by another, and if we do it right, the next chapter is always better. I tried to tell my students that Thursday. I’m not sure I was successful: no one can ease a pain that’s almost voluntary. Adolescence loves misery in small doses, especially the pain of loss.

I like to think I’m still an adolescent at heart, so now I sit, smiling, looking through pictures I snapped the final day, feeling honored that I had the privileged of working with such incredible kids, wondering what the future holds for those fourteen-year-olds that I grew to love. What do we know when we’re fourteen?

I know many of my students, due to the tragedies and misfortunes they had no part in, know more about pain than I know though I’m twenty-five years older than them. I tried to make the daily fifty minutes I spent with them a pleasant experience, but I know I let them down. It haunts me, and it’s the bitter part of the bittersweetness of the end of a school year.

Thursday evening I met a former student — I’ll call him Ed — who gave me utter hell when he sat in my sixth period class. “I gave everyone hell,” he would say if he read this. “I was just making bad decisions. I just wanted to be bad,” Ed explained Thursday night as he explained the path his life has taken in the intervening three years. I finished that year thinking I’d let him down, swearing I’d never do it again, and now I know I have done it again. And I’ll do it yet again — probably next year.

So I sit, scrolling through pictures, wondering where the lines of these kids’ lives will lead them, eager to get to know next year’s batch, wondering if I’ll ever lose this sadness I feel at the end of school years, and hoping I never will.

How could I, when students leave notes like this on my board?