Why I'll Sloppy-Cry at My Daughter's Graduation

Time is invisible, until every once in a while it isn't. A meditation on the flow of time: the awe of it, the ache of it, and everything in between.

I’m eleven years old and I’m sloppy-crying, as I turn the final page of Where the Red Fern Grows.

It isn’t the death of the dogs that gets me, though. Nor is it the red fern sprouting over their graves like a prehistoric tombstone. Rather, it’s the grown boy, Billy, imagining someday returning to the scene of his childhood:

I’d like to go back—back to those beautiful hills. I’d like to walk again on the trails I walked in my boyhood days…

I’d like to take a walk far back in the flinty hills and search for a souvenir, an old double-bitted ax stuck deep in the side of a white oak tree. I know the handle has been long since rotted away with time. Perhaps the rusty frame of a coal-oil lantern still hangs there on the blade.

It’s the image of that rusted ax blade that completely undoes me. Something about returning to a place where the remnants of the past visibly remain—time folding over on itself like some holy accordion. I can’t comprehend the overwhelming ache and awe of it. I can only cry it out as I drift to sleep, my cheek pressed against a wet pillowcase.

Time is invisible, until every once in a while it isn’t.

Seven years later, on the verge of leaving for college, I’m walking down the sixth fairway of the golf course where I spent much of my high school years. As I approach the green, I see a vision of every version of me that has ever walked through that space—suddenly all present at once—moving to and fro in every direction. The space is crammed with my past. I’m not remembering it, I’m experiencing it, and it’s so sacred I can barely stand it, as the sunset swims in front of me.

Time is always flowing past us, but also collecting around us.

Twenty years more, and I’ve just moved back to the scene of my own childhood—a rural town in Illinois. My kids are the age I once was and I’m driving them home through familiar countryside. It’s a late spring evening, the sun setting low and orange across the newly-plowed fields. The burnt rays come to rest upon an abandoned barn, its faded red glory barely a rumor on its disintegrating timbers. In the old barn I can see years and decades—maybe even a century—of hopes and harvests, come and gone forever. The sunset swims once more.

Time is more sandpaper than Swatch watch.

I’ve spent much of my writerly life trying grasp these glimpses of time. For instance, in my first novel I wrote:

I’d always thought of time as a river, bending in some places but mostly linear, carrying us along until we eventually disembark at our designated dock. It isn’t true, though. Time is more like the place where the ocean meets the land. It isn’t linear. The tide of it ebbs and flows. It waves and crashes. It has rip tides and undertows that can pull you outward into its expanse and downward into its depths. Your past isn’t something you leave behind you, upriver. It’s a pair of sunglasses knocked off your head by a crashing wave, seemingly gone for good, only to be washed up on shore a little way down the beach.

I titled that novel The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell. In the German translation, it has been retitled to Der Fluss per Erinnerung, which means “the flow of time.” The Germans get it.

Every time I write something that resonates with that image of a rusty old ax blade wedged into a tree trunk in the Ozarks, it feels somehow both exceptionally beautiful and exquisitely painful, all at once.

Time is wonder that hurts.

Next week, our youngest child graduates eighth grade. She’s our baby. When she was born, it felt like an end to the long beginning of our family. Now, as she walks out of middle school and into high school, it feels like the beginning of, hopefully, a very long ending. By itself, her graduation is just an hour of pomp and circumstance. Within the flow of time, however, it is an unspeakable wonder that hurts a lot.

And as I contemplate this commencement of hers, I feel closer than ever to understanding why Where the Red Fern Grows wrecked me all those years ago:

I’m the rusting ax blade.

Every once in a while, this precious, painful truth intrudes upon my awareness, but to save myself the pain of it I push it back into the shadows. Precious things, though, don’t belong in the shadows. They belong out here in the light, where we can feel the flow of them.

I’m forty-seven years old now. As my daughter dons her graduation dress—looking more like her mother than ever—I’ll be sloppy-crying like a kid again, and another sunset will begin to swim, because we’re meant to feel not just the awe of it, nor just the ache of it, but the all of it.

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Does this reflection make you feel the awe, the ache, or both? I’d love to connect with you in the comments. And thanks for hitting that heart and/or spinny-circle-Restack button below. They help others find these words.