The Futures We Get

When my middle son graduated from high school yesterday, I started crying before he even made it to his seat. Before the speeches, before they called his name, before he crossed the stage in his cap and gown and officially became one of those young adults people start referring to as “the future.” The tears started almost immediately, somewhere around the principal’s introductory remarks, while families were still settling into their seats.

Here’s something you may not know about me: I almost always cry at public performances. Weddings, funerals, graduations, Broadway shows, high school musicals, you name it. Put me in a crowded auditorium with swelling music, visible vulnerability, or people publicly celebrating one another, and there is a very real chance I will tear up.

What may surprise you, despite my tears at public rituals, is that I’m not actually much of a crier in the rest of my life. My husband jokes that I’m one of the least sentimental people he knows. The thing is, I spent a lot of years learning how to push difficult emotions down instead of out. I can feel things deeply while appearing remarkably composed, especially in front of other people. Public ceremonies, though, seem to bypass whatever emotional containment system I normally operate with.

So there I was, crying before the ceremony had really even begun, my husband gripping my hand while both of us tried to contain the tears.

Part of my tears was simple pride. When I found myself in my late twenties, suddenly the mother of two little boys, I made a promise to myself: I would raise good men. Not wildly accomplished men, but kind men. Men who know how to care about other people. Men who make the lives of the people around them a little softer. Sitting in those folding chairs yesterday, watching my son prepare to walk across that stage, I realized that somehow, impossibly, he had become exactly that.

He’s headed to an honors college at a school he’s genuinely excited to attend. He works as an EMT, is a certified personal trainer, and somehow manages to be both disciplined and hilariously unserious at the same time. More importantly, though, he’s thoughtful in the ways that matter most to me. He notices when someone needs help and steps in without being asked. He’s deeply affectionate with his younger brother, fiercely loyal to the people he loves, and he’s still willing to hug his mother in public. If I ask him to help around the house, his response is always, “I would love to,” delivered in the most sarcastic tone imaginable. Yet he still does the thing cheerfully every single time, usually while making me laugh in the process. His future feels bright to me. I’m profoundly proud of the human being he has become.

My son, though, was not the only boy sitting beside me at that graduation ceremony.

Also there with me were my three nephews who died several years ago in a plane crash. It was the youngest of them I found myself thinking about most. He was only thirteen when he died, still in that in-between space between little boy and young man, old enough for glimpses of who he might become, but far too young for any of us to know. There’s something especially painful about losing someone before adulthood because what remains afterward is not only grief for the person they were, but grief for the person they never got to become.

My nephew loved music and singing. His voice wasn’t particularly good, which didn’t matter to him in the slightest. He sang loudly, enthusiastically, and with his entire heart. Even as a little kid, he moved through the world with this remarkable emotional openness that made people want to move toward him. He was funny and loving and unguarded. You could see, even when he was small, that he led with his heart first and trusted the world to meet him kindly in return. Watching my own son sitting among hundreds of graduating seniors in caps and gowns, I kept thinking about how my nephew never had the chance to do this. Instead, his life ended before any of us got to see the shape his adulthood might have taken.

As I looked out across the rows of graduates facing toward futures they assume will unfold in front of them, I felt like I was holding something many of them don’t know. Some of those young people will go on to build beautiful lives full of love, connection, ordinary routines, heartbreak, reinvention, marriages, careers, children, friendships, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons they can’t even imagine. Some will travel roads far more difficult than they currently expect. And some may not get nearly as much time as they believe they have.

Young people, of course, are supposed to feel invincible. That innocence is part of what gives them their energy, their confidence, and their ability to move toward life without constantly calculating risk and fragility.

Grief, though, permanently changes the way you experience public rituals like graduations. Once you have buried people young, these milestones stop feeling routine and start feeling almost miraculous. You become acutely aware of how much had to go right for this exact moment to exist at all. Every graduate sitting in those chairs represents thousands of ordinary days that accumulated into adulthood. Every diploma feels like both an accomplishment and an extraordinary act of survival. Watching my son walk across that stage, I felt overwhelmingly proud of the man he is becoming while simultaneously grieving the adulthood my nephew never got the chance to reach.

Yesterday, I felt both the weight of what had been lost and the staggering privilege of still getting to witness what comes next.