Being proud...

There are watershed moments that we carry with us all of our lives. Every experience builds on another, and that on another. Losing your spouse when your children are young leaves you, and them, with a hole in your experiences that seems to heal over, then open, then heal over, then open. The loss, over the long term, is a handle-able thing. Not that it is ever an easy thing, but you comes to terms with certain aspects of it all, and you find ways to move forward in a way that is consistent with the part of the relationship that you hold in your heart. Even so, every once in a while, a time comes along when you just dearly miss having your spouse with you. One of those is coming up.

Four years ago, it happened when my oldest child graduated from college. Here was a young man who, not for being asked to, but just out of circumstance, had to serve as a male role model for his younger siblings. A young man who had struggled with aspects of school because of his "abundant energy" and numerous other obstacles, but who had persevered and obtained his degree. I so missed having his father there to be proud of him with me. There were others there who had been monumental support on all different levels, but the one who had helped to bring him into the world and had given him his name was not, except in spirit. So, I was incredibly proud and happy and deeply sad at the same time.

Now, four years later comes along our third-born child, ready to graduate with highest academic honors. She has worked extremely hard - earned scholarships and found jobs to enable her to attend a school away from home, and spent hours upon hours thinking, dreaming, creating and helping others to do the same. She has found a church home and grown with her friends there, and kept a beautiful spirit about her through it all. She will walk down that aisle, and I will have the same emotions well up again, knowing that her father's spirit is surely with us, knowing that his sweet baby girl that he was so thrilled to have has become such a lovely confident young woman. And he will laugh at whatever she glues to the top of her mortar board, remembering his own antics at his high school graduation.

And then, a year from now, when our second-born son gets his first degree, once again I will live with this experience as he celebrates his journey of struggling to find his passion, and then following through on it. And it will be as much a celebration of "finding", as of the self-confidence that has blossomed and shone and lifted him into a new vision of himself as capable and valuable in the world outside of home. And his father again will be with us somehow, bursting with pride in the young man who is so in his likeness in so many ways. He will be with us, but not in the way where you can hold his strong hand and see the joy in his face, and again, I will be proud and happy and also deeply sad.

Then, when all of this is done, we will continue our journeys in this world - finding our paths, taking our turns in the road, climbing over obstacles, and making new relationships until finally, we meet him again in the journey and have all of our questions answered. And love will reign over all.