I’ve been wrapping graduation gifts and finding cards that can hold a gift certificate or a little cash. This year graduating seniors are excited to be anticipating an actual in-person graduation ceremony instead of last year’s online or zoom virtual ceremony necessitated by the pandemic.
Our grandson just finished his first year of college in New York state, but is coming back to Indiana for the great pageantry of Culver Military Academy and a year-delayed ceremony. It will be a treat to have our daughter Amy’s family gathering in to see Simon “graduate”, even with a year of college under his belt.
We already had his party last year. I spent the month before we met for a small masked celebration going through tubs of pictures and shuffling through memories of him collected since his birth to make a huge scrapbook of this sweet child. Maybe this year we can just get it out again and look at it together.
All this “double graduation” makes me remember what my mother gave me for my graduation from high school. It was a full Webster’s Dictionary that I have used in the years since until the pages started to fall out. It is now in one of the glass cases in the “museum” section of our recording studio. It is a treasure, not only because of my life-long love of words, but for a poem she wrote in her own handwriting inside the front cover.
The sheep may know the pasture,
But the Shepherd knows the sheep;
The sheep lie down in comfort
But the Shepherd does not sleep.He protects the young and foolish
From their unprecocious way
And gently prods the aged
Lest they give in to the clay.When the young have learned some wisdom,
It is much too late to act;
When the old man knows the method,
He is less sure of the fact.Ah, the Shepherd knows the answer—
The beginning and the end.
So the wisest choice, my daughter,
Is to take him as your friend.
--Mother
This and many other writings confirm for me, now decades later, that my mother was one of the wisest persons I ever knew. At 17 I knew she was, but not like I know it now.
Perhaps the line I’ve most thought about over the years is “...Lest they give in to the clay.”
From the time I was a child, my parents wanted me to be able to recognize and choose the things that last forever. We had as a family many discussions about what is eternal and what is not, not just when we die, but every day we live. I remember my mother saying to me as a high school girl, “Gloria, don’t ever forfeit anything eternal for someone whose name you won’t remember ten years from now.”
When we began to have children of our own, Bill and I wrote a song that Suzanne later asked Bill to sing at her wedding. It was titled “The Things That Last Forever.” Of course, he had a hard time getting through the song that day.
But of all the things my parents made sure I understood, to recognize what is eternal in every moment and to give myself for things that will never die was perhaps the most important— “lest I give in to the clay.”
Now I am in the autumn of my life. What do I want to have gotten said to our children, to our great-grandchildren, to people who have heard the song of our lives? It is this: “Think ‘forever’!” because now is forever. Forever starts here. Heaven starts here—and so does hell. We’re building forever with the choices we make today.
To all graduates—whether graduating from high school, college, the transition chapter of your life, or from this life itself, think “forever.” Will what I choose today last forever? Can I recognize the eternal in this moment, and am I giving myself away for things that will never die?
