June 15, 2026
Two weeks ago, my youngest son graduated from high school. Is the point of the ceremony to have the wise elders witness as adolescents take their first steps into adulthood? If so, let me disclose that one of the elders arrived having chosen not to wear sunscreen. The school held an outdoor baccalaureate mass on graduation afternoon, in the full June sun, and for the next several days my pink face and painful hairline served as evidence that age and wisdom are not the same.
The sunscreen was not the only thing I had failed to prepare for. When you parent an infant or toddler, “last” milestones slip by mostly invisible and unnoticed: the last changed diaper, the last time you pick your child up. Nobody puts those on the calendar. Senior year is different. Senior year announces every ending in advance, then gives you months to be weird about it. The last curriculum night, the last football game, the last time I got to watch him play any organized sport — and then finally, on graduation afternoon, the last time we set foot on the high school campus. As I sat watching all the kids in their green robes and silly hats, slowly broiling in the June sun, I kept looking at the walls protectively surrounding us in the quad and thinking, “This is it. After six years,1Our youngest son is not a Steve Holt; he graduated in four years. But his high school years overlapped with his older brother, so as a family, we’ve been involved with the school for six. when we leave today, we’re not coming back.” That hit me harder than I expected.
After all of this buildup, the graduation ceremony itself was an anticlimax. Granted, the school put on a well-rehearsed program in a beautiful venue downtown. But after eighteen years of parenting, thirteen years of schooling, months of realizing we’d done some routine activity for the last time… it all culminated in ten seconds of watching my son walk across the stage to accept… an empty diploma holder. For some reason, they mail the actual diplomas later. Maybe to make sure each student actually met the graduation requirements?
If the graduation ceremony was anticlimactic, the immediate aftermath was somehow even worse. As we filed out of the orchestra seating at McCaw Hall to try to find our son in the lobby, I’d foolishly hoped for a meaningful opportunity to pass wisdom from one generation to the next. Instead, what awaited us in the lobby was an insane crowd, extremely bad lighting for photo opportunities, and a young adult impatient to leave his parents and grandparents behind so he could join his friends for the school-sponsored all-night party. Before I knew it, we were left alone.
We talk about graduation as a rite of passage for the child. It’s a rite of passage for parents, too. True, you never stop being a parent, but the nature of the job changes. Our job now is to show up, cheer from the audience, and take the badly lit photos. We offer wisdom when asked, if we have it — but I don’t know when they’ll start asking again! Then we watch as they walk away toward their friends, hopefully on their way to something good… and resist the urge to shout one last reminder about sunscreen.