There are several ways I could do this.
I could tell the truth: Matt Gillis is a 29-year-old University of New Hampshire student.
I could lie: He is an angry man, not friendly at all. His life is stagnant, his future bleak.
I could write a corny college magazine article: Not only is Matt Gillis a non-traditional student, he's a non-traditional person!
Or I could just summarize: In 1978 Matthew Gillis was born in Lowell. He grew up in Hampton Beach. When Matt was 16, his best friend killed himself. Matt followed that by a slow crawl through High School and years of drinking. Burning out and getting sick of "doing the same thing again and again" he decided to go back to school: Northern Essex Community College. Then he got cancer around the time he started medicine for bipolar disorder. Somewhere in there he met his girlfriend, Emma, and took on the responsibility of a father by helping her raise (just about from birth) her son, 7-year-old Mika.
Cancer free, about to graduate college, and a day away from fatherhood Matt Gillis sits in the MUB kitchenette sucking coffee from a plastic fake coconut cup through a neon—yellow twisty straw.
"Do you have anything to add?” I ask.
"I"m having a baby man. I don't know what else there is to say. I'm having a baby. A baby girl. Tomorrow."
* * * *
Do you know those people who seem to have it all together? Not necessarily getting the best grades, or doing everything in life right, but they smile wide, and laugh loud and who-could-want-more? Matt is one of those people.
He has a voice like a book on tape. When he reads poetry in class it booms through the room and he usually hit’s the rhythm right. If he stumbles on the words, stutters, reads a word that isn’t there—things that usually make someone get nervous and embarrassed—he corrects himself and continues on with full confidence.
That's the way Matt acts. But he sort of sits down and leans forward and tells me he has 20 minutes to talk and says: "I try to be care free, but I have a lot of stress and anxiety."
So Matt does smile, more often then not, but at times he is overwhelmed, just like us all.
* * * *
Hampton beach is insane, then dead. Insane, then dead. During the summer season the boardwalk stores open up, tourists hit the beach, there is work for the locals, and then, when those three glorious summer months are gone: it's dead.
"It's like Mardi Gras for three months of the year, and for the rest of the time there's nothing. It's like a big culture shock—it messes with people. I know everyone I went to school with is absolutely insane."
As the insanity raged around him, Matt thinks he satisfied the requirements of a normal childhood: "I had the normal things happen. I had an appendix out, I broke a couple arms."
At 16 something bad happened. At 16, Matt's 15-year-old best friend killed himself. "Everything seemed fine, and then he was gone." Two days before the suicide there had been a party at Mat's best friend's house. Matt played the guitar, his friend the drums. He had seemed happy enough. "It'll do it to you when someone you’re really close to kills themselves," Matt says, bleak for a
moment. "I dove head first into drinking."
The drinking part is shady—Matt doesn't want to talk. He murmurs sometimes, saying the years were a waste. Matt dragged his feet through high school: "I started drinking a lot, I guess. I was getting in trouble. I took a while to graduate, finally I did."
A main point Matt kept going back to was that he is sober now. He no longer drinks. He is sober, he wants us to know that. He wants everyone to know that. "Looking back I wish I never even started drinking," Matt says. “It causes problems."
* * * *
There is that question for every non-traditional student: "Your not our age, why are you here?" And there are many different answers. Sometimes it's the single mother trying to start anew, with a kid in high school and a full-time job on the side. Sometimes its the middle-aged man, willing to sacrifice some time for a few college credits, because he thinks the knowledge is as valuable as the diploma. For Matt, the answer seems to be Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. "Cancer,"' Matt says, "was my wake up call."
In 2000 Matt was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Statistically, it you have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and receive proper and timely treatment, you'll probably survive, but being told that within the next year there is a chance you will die, and the only way to stay alive is by being run through the stringer of radiation and chemicals known as cancer treatment—that’s a life event. "It really changed my outlook on life. I was faced with my own mortality. The idea that I may or may not survive this disease."
With the determination that comes when one realizes that it's possible to die no matter how unfair and meaningless it seems, Matt made it to UNH in 2004. Some of the credits from Northern Essex Community College transferred. He‘s an English major now.
* * * *
Matt hides the coconut cup in the MUB Kitchenette, he also hides a baggie of ground coffee. When he has a moment, he make's himself a cup. He tells me that he is going to a meeting with a teacher, jokes that he's bringing the coconut, actually does bring the coconut, and, when he is done the meeting, asks me if want to walk to Stoke with him. The meeting he had was to decide if he is ready to graduate. He has all the credits he needs, he just needs to drop off his intent to graduate form.
His confident steps carry him over the sludge puddles outside of Stoke Hall and into the registrar's office. He goes to the desk and hands them the intent to graduate form. There are all the proper signatures, everything is in order.
“Thanks," he says and steps back from the counter and into a new life epoch. Baring an obscene tragedy, Matt Gillis is soon to be a college graduate.
* * * *
“Talk about a defining moment in my life," Matt says as he describes holding his daughter in his arms for the first time, “It puts it all in perspective." So the Hampton Beach childhood is in perspective. His best friends death in perspective, the cancer, now college, all in perspective.
"When I was 16 I didn't see much of a future. I thought I'd be partying and living it up. But things change."
