In the last couple months, both of my children graduated, one from college and the other from high school. Excitement, pride, and poignancy blended in these bittersweet moments. Time crept up on me. Only looking back did I see the claim of its ponderous heft. Yet, these are the goals for which we labored as parents, to see them grow and progress well in the world. Is it a particular sting of our fallen world that we must buy such achievements at the cost of loss and separation? Maybe part of the transcendence of paradise is the coexistence of all joys together because time and space will no longer limit us.

Commencement

It’s not so very different with our books. We authors pour in painstaking years of hope and effort. We revel in every triumph and agonize over the most minute cuts. Our baby is blooming, and we swell with anticipation for its shining advancement into the world. But when it goes, the void of its absence hits us. Not only do we miss it, but we cannot protect it anymore. And it does not belong only to us.

The reality makes me want to hold on to the siblings that remain, stretch the time when they warm and cheer me alone. I have no more kids, but why rush the books?

Yet, as with children, if we grip too tightly, we stifle their vitality. And then we lose them anyway. Like all precious gifts, they were meant to go forth and delight. So, I plug away at preparing the next book in the Far Stone Cycle to launch, grateful that advancing age does not yet limit the germination of new stories. And I thank you, dear readers, for being eager to receive them.

I have heard that relationships with adult children can be richer and fuller than all that came before. Perhaps I’ve even glimpsed it and can face the future. I suppose that is why it’s called commencement. They will start new stories, and so will I. Beginnings can be slow and gloomy. But I expect to see a bright dawning, on the other side of this grief observed.