Eight Years

Our sweet youngest daughter graduates high school at the end of this week. I can’t believe I’m writing that, because sometimes it feels like Anna just graduated. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t.

There are eight years between Anna’s graduation and Ella’s. Only eight years. For some reason, that comforts me a little, because those years feel so much longer than eight. At times, they feel closer to twenty. So much life has happened inside them.

After Anna graduated, Ella began homeschooling in fifth grade. A year and a half later, a global pandemic arrived, and all of us were changed by that experience in ways we are still trying to understand.

We lost three pets in one year. I entered menopause. Our family went through a stretch of difficult seasons that changed the rhythm of our lives for a long time. Some of those things I’ve shared here, and some I’ve kept quieter, mostly out of respect for the people I love.

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Ella eventually returned to public school as a freshman, and that transition was a much bigger emotional process for our family than I ever talked about publicly. As she prepares to graduate now, there’s pride in that, but also relief. Relief that we made it through some years that felt genuinely hard.

The pride I feel isn’t the kind that’s easy to explain. It isn’t about grades, though she earned good ones. It isn’t about popularity, though she is exactly the kind of friend people are always glad to hear from — not because she’s the loudest in the room, but because she leads with comfort, compassion, and genuine care.

It’s something quieter than that.

She faced some difficult years when she was younger. The path from then to now was not easy for her, or for us. There were times she had to keep going in environments where she wasn’t always understood or believed in the way she should have been.

Mike and I have joked that we should be getting our own diplomas this week, and honestly, I’m only half joking.

What I know is this: she is a strong, deeply good human being. She has had to work hard to get to this place, in ways that have not always been visible. And she kept going anyway.

Some days are harder for her than others. And she keeps showing up anyway. She is scared and ready at the same time. Fearful, but here.

That isn’t a small thing. It is, I think, the whole thing.

And still, life kept unfolding in its own way…

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During those same years, my childhood best friend died of cancer, while another close friend was fighting cancer himself. Thankfully, he recovered.

Then my dad was diagnosed with cancer and died four months later, a loss that still feels impossible to fully absorb.

Several months after he died, I got COVID for the first time, and I think grief, menopause, exhaustion, and everything else happening around us slowly changed me too. I became less social, less motivated, lower energy. I pulled inward more than I used to.

Then Mike was diagnosed with heart failure and eventually needed open-heart surgery.

Add in the general heaviness of the world these last several years, and I think a lot of us understand why time feels distorted now. Why eight years can somehow feel both fast and impossibly long at the exact same time.

And yet, here we are. At graduation again.

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A few days ago, I reread a post I wrote in 2016 called In Ten Years. At the end of it, I wrote this:

“I think, for the next ten years, I’ll move to the front row. I’ll open my eyes. Let go of the seat belt. And scream as loudly as I can. Because this time, I want to take in the view.”

I sat there staring at those words for a long time.

Because the woman who wrote them had no idea what was coming. She didn’t know about the losses, the diagnoses, the grief, the exhaustion, the fear, the ways life would crack us open and rearrange us. She didn’t know how much surviving there would be in those years.

But she also didn’t know this:

That we would make it here. To another graduation. Another ending and beginning. Another moment standing in the backyard, wondering how time moved both fast and painfully slow.

And maybe that younger version of me was right after all. Maybe the point was never to avoid the ride. Maybe it was simply to stay awake for it. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts.

Because here we are. Still loving each other. Still standing. Still becoming. And somehow, after everything, life feels good in a way I could not have fully understood eight years ago. Not easy. Not simple. But good.

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Look at the magic of reality
While accepting with all honesty
That we can’t know for sure what’s next

Song: Visions by Jose Gonzalez