“Can this absence be excused?” I hear that question a lot. When I first came to the University in 2001, a majority of students came to class – even on Fridays.

By 2004 that changed. Spurred by complaints from the faithful attendees, I reluctantly have taken periodic attendance ever since. But I don’t take attendance just to put “butts in the seats.” It’s about creating a community of learning.

Think about how an athletic team performs in front of a lifeless, empty stadium – no teamwork, lots of mistakes, right? The same is true for poorly attended classes. The sense of community is lost, and everyone loses out.

Conversely, a full stadium or classroom feels like a family. This is surely true at Sanford Stadium, but it can happen in the Student Learning Center too. As one of my late mentors wrote me once when I was out of class with a knee injury, “We need you!”

I didn’t anticipate what an invasive experience attendance-taking would be, however. To obtain excused absences, students provided me with medical forms and reports, and even church bulletins proving that a loved one had indeed died. I was completely embarrassed at unintentionally intruding on students’ personal lives in that way.

And tough questions kept arising: What’s an excusable absence? Does it require illness or death? What about a loved one who is near death? And how do you know who is close to death?

For example, in late spring two years ago a student of mine asked if he could be excused from class to go to lunch with his dad. I told him, sorry, that’s not excusable – but having lunch with your dad is a fantastic idea, go do it anyway.

As cruel fate would have it, that one absence ended up dropping the student’s borderline course grade by a full letter. But that’s not the sad part of the story. Shortly after finals, the student died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage.

Afterward, I was relieved I hadn’t deprived the student of a last lunch with his dad. But I have been haunted ever since by the grade he received.

Today, I reply to students’ requests for excused absences by saying “family is important to me” and bending the attendance rules.

Today the tables are turned. I’m the one absent from class, in New Jersey at the memorial service for my beloved aunt Dardy. She died two Thursdays ago, and today would have been her 86th birthday.

In a Southern family aunts can be moms, and cousins can be siblings. That’s how it is in my family, and especially with aunt Dardy.

She was always leading the way for me. She gave me my first book on the weather at age 5, starting me on a lifelong career path.

She bought a college-level textbook in radar meteorology for me when I was 11. Three decades later, when I was about to purchase a book to serve as the focal point for a class event, I discovered it on my bookshelf. Yep, Dardy had sent it to me, a good year or two before I even knew I needed it.

Despite health problems that Mayo Clinic doctors said would kill her in the 1940s, Dardy carved out her own life of service against great odds. She learned Spanish late in life and worked for the Roman Catholic Church in the poor Hispanic section of Miami for more than 30 years. In her 80s she mastered the Internet and composed four meticulously researched volumes of family history.

The last time I talked to her on the phone, she knew more about the current presidential campaign than most readers of this paper.

I hope my absence today can be excused to honor such an inspiration as my aunt Dardy. Her absence, after a long rich life, is most definitely excused.

But I feel the same sense of lost community as I feel in my classroom when students miss my classes, even for the very best of reasons.

To Dardy I say, as my late mentor said to me: “We need you!”

- John Knox is an assistant professor in the department of geography.