The Academy of Natural Sciences opened its doors to the public for what they say was the last time at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. We parked on the other side of Logan Square near Sister Cities at 10:02, grabbed our big umbrella and traipsed through the rain to wait at the back of a line that snaked to the end of the block. 

On our way in, a reporter asked if anyone wanted to be interviewed about what the Academy meant to them. Casey, my 8-year-old son, might as well have pulled out a microphone from the pocket of his rain jacket. 

He said he thought it was “selfish” of the people in charge to close the museum when they had been offered the money needed to keep it open, at least in the short term. He told the reporter he loved the museum and had enjoyed several weeks of attending summer camp there. He said he had been coming since he was 4.

For what now feels like too brief a time, dinosaurs were the most important thing in our lives. Casey, like me as a child, has a tendency to turn his interests into obsession into his whole personality. For me, it was baseball cards. For him, it was animals, then sea creatures, then dinosaurs, then Pokémon, and now Dungeons and Dragons. 

In the middle of his dinosaur fascination, my wife Rachel first took him to the Academy. What a gift it was to find a place so perfectly curated for him. She still talks about the time he cornered an expert and the two of them discussed a trilobite fossil for 30 minutes. Three years ago, if you named any dinosaur, I would have been able to tell you which period it was from, maybe what it looked like, probably how to spell it. His daily quizzes trained us well. Now, that knowledge has mostly faded away. It took me a few minutes of straining to even remember the word cretaceous. I’m sure that’s part of why this whole thing has felt so existential. 

When Casey’s stump speech was finished, the reporter asked me how I felt about it all. I said it made me angry. How could a purported institution of learning willingly shut the doors to such an important place for nurturing the education of the city’s children? The flippancy with which Drexel seems to be operating, thumbing their nose in opposition of public support and private funding, merited real scorn. They should be ashamed. And I’m no expert, but why couldn’t the city step in with a heavier hand? Cherelle Parker, desperate for public approval, why not designate the building as worthy of historical significance and protection? 

You can hear me bargaining through the stages of grief. Hold on for depression. 

Inside, Casey and I beelined first for the gift shop. We came as a family of five to pay our respects earlier in the month and the line for the gift shop was so long we promised Casey we would come back for a souvenir to remember the place by. Now, on its final day, the place had been picked over. Luckily, there was a rotating stand of personalized dinosaur nameplates with the museum’s logo included. There was a “Casey” for him and a “Leah” for his baby sister. There was no “Jane” for our middle daughter, so he picked out one of those cricket lollipops to bring her instead. 

From there, we walked through both floors of the dinosaur hall then settled on a bench at the start of the dioramas so he could write a few things in his notebook. I don’t know that it’s a good thing he inherited my sentimentality, but whenever we’re ridding the house of old toys or broken high chairs or whatever else, he’ll make sure we take a picture of the soon-to-be-gone item. I did the same thing when we cleaned out my childhood home. I don’t think either of us has ever revisited those photos, but it’s comforting to know they exist somewhere.

Naturally, then, I handed him my phone to take pictures as we walked through the Academy for the last time. Looking through now, I count 168 pictures. He also inherited my inefficiency. 

The dinosaur hall is the most iconic part of the museum, but real Academy Heads know the beating heart of the place is on the third floor, in the “Outside In” room. This is where a variety of insects, lizards, spiders and ground-bound animals are on display. There’s a reading nook, a variety of objects to place under a microscope and a series of scavenger hunts built into the room’s display. This, more than any other public place in the city, is where our family has felt at home. And this is where, on Sunday, it really felt like the end of the world. 

The museum’s wonderful employees were not given the courtesy of learning of their pending unemployment by their employer. Instead, they learned of their month-long plank walk through the media. In the aftermath, they turned the “Outside In” room into a testament to the Academy’s legacy, offering visitors the chance to affix sticky notes of testimony to the wall. By Sunday, the place was blanketed in a tragic cross-section of generational heartbreak. Beautiful cursive pleas to reconsider overlaid by a child’s drawing of a T-Rex. “My great grandfather took my grandpa here. My grandpa brought my mom, and today I’m here with my daughter. 5 generations. Thank you for everything.” hanging from the wall a few inches away from “I <3 Dino.” 

Is this how everything will end? With a select few people with their hand on the button who have the ability and means to save the thing every man, woman and child wants them to, only they can’t be bothered? The pain of finality subsumed by the bewilderment of how utterly unnecessary the ending is. It was hard to breathe.

I did say depression was coming. 

Lord knows there are bigger problems. One thing those greater hells and the shuttering of a 198-year-old institution have in common is the paralysis of modern parenting. We want our children to think about others, to share, to tell the truth, to chase their passions. We want that in spite of the evidence it’s not how the world works. The new Golden Rule: Do unto others as would most increase shareholder value. 

“What’s going to happen to the tortoise?” I heard someone ask one Academy employee as another took back an enormous cockroach from the hands of my son (there are at least some differences between us). A zoo has offered, apparently, and other places have promised to keep certain beings together that have bonded to one another. Who knows what will happen to the fossils from the dinosaur hall, or the 19 million specimens held behind closed doors, or of the potential domino effect on the city’s museum area as a whole. 

What fills the hole in the next dinosaur kid’s heart? 

We left the Academy sometime around 11:30. Later, scores of museum supporters marched through the rain to city hall in another show of defiance. Count our family among those grateful for those continuing to fight. 

Maybe acceptance doesn’t have to be inevitable.