Our fam­ily has been through some major tran­si­tions over the course of the past year, and the evening of June 3, 2010, not only felt like the cul­mi­na­tion of all the changes we have expe­ri­enced recently, it also marked the end of one long chap­ter of my life. It was excit­ing, ful­fill­ing, sat­is­fy­ing … and both men­tally and phys­i­cally exhausting.

We don’t always know, at a pre­cise moment in time, that we are expe­ri­enc­ing the end of an era, a jour­ney, an ongo­ing event, a rela­tion­ship. Some­times we don’t under­stand until later that a finite point in time was indeed that moment of final­ity. In other cases, the full weight of reach­ing the end of some­thing bears down on us as the moment approaches and for a period of time after­ward. In those cir­cum­stances, we have the oppor­tu­nity to antic­i­pate and pre­pare for that life-altering moment, but we can’t always pre­dict how we will feel once it arrives.

So it was with my youngest son’s recent grad­u­a­tion from high school.

My boys at Christ­mas­time, 1991. Robert was 4 1/2 years; Matthew was just one month old.

Obvi­ously, like any proud par­ent, I looked for­ward to the evening when I would watch him march in with his class to the strains of “Pomp and Cir­cum­stance” wear­ing his silly-looking mor­tar­board and robe, and col­lect his hard-earned diploma. That small piece of paper sym­bol­izes the cul­mi­na­tion of twelve years (not count­ing preschool and kinder­garten) of drag­ging his sleepy butt out of bed, get­ting him dressed, mak­ing sure his back­pack held every­thing he needed for the day, and dri­ving him to school on time (hope­fully) before head­ing off to work. Along the way, there were also many days when I had to arrange for some­one else to per­form those parental respon­si­bil­i­ties for me while I was out of town on busi­ness trips. When he was in ele­men­tary school, my mother was still alive and able to drive to his school. There were days when his father worked over­time, so he was excited about rid­ing in Nana’s car to her house. Later, when she could no longer drive, he became well-known to the local dis­patcher who took my calls for appoint­ments with our local Dial-A-Ride ser­vice. She would say, “Oh, Matthew’s going to Grandma’s today!” with­out ask­ing for the address. After my mother began resid­ing in an assisted liv­ing facil­ity and we moved into the house my par­ents built in 1959, that dis­patcher con­grat­u­lated and com­mended us for keep­ing the home in the fam­ily — and assured me that Matthew would be picked up and deliv­ered to our new home safely.

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Share a mem­ory or story about one or both of your grandfathers.


He sat in an over-sized chair in the liv­ing room wear­ing bib over­alls. One leg crossed over the other, his ankle rested on the oppo­site knee. He wore men’s clas­sic style leather slip­pers and the bot­toms of his pant legs were folded up form­ing cuffs. Every so often, he flicked the ashes from his ever-present cig­a­rette into the cuff of the pant leg perched on his knee. It seemed such a bizarre rit­ual to me and, although I never asked, I won­dered why my grand­mother tol­er­ated it.

He said very lit­tle. As I think back on those vis­its now, I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of him ever directly address­ing me, and yet I tell myself that he must have at least asked me how I was, how things were at school … But I can­not clearly hear his voice in my head. All I remem­ber is that he was soft-spoken and as I sat uncom­fort­ably on the couch across the room from him, I noted the resem­blance my father bore to him and won­dered if, as my father aged, he too would be bald.

I don’t remem­ber the day we learned that he had lung can­cer. But I do recall that there came a point when I was no longer to required to accom­pany my par­ents when they vis­ited him in the con­va­les­cent hos­pi­tal where he was spend­ing his last days. One night, they returned and told us that he had died while they were sit­ting at his bed­side. He was in a coma. My mother relayed that, as she gazed at him lying in the bed, she real­ized he was not breath­ing and alerted my father. The med­ical per­son­nel con­firmed that he was gone.

I was in the fourth grade and his was the first funeral I ever attended. My par­ents talked about the logis­tics in advance, so I knew that there would be two areas in which atten­dees would be seated. We would be in the larger of the two rooms, rather than on the couches in the lit­tle room off to the side where the rest of his fam­ily would gather. My father made it clear that he would be dri­ving us to the ser­vice at the funeral home and, after­ward, the ceme­tery, in his own car. We would not be join­ing his rel­a­tives in the funeral home’s limousine.

Frankly, the image of that old, bald man lying in the cas­ket is more vivid to me than all of the vis­its we paid to him in his home com­bined. I remem­ber think­ing how odd he looked. His face was dif­fer­ent; his skinned appeared waxy and as though it had been pulled tightly across his face. His lips were an odd shade of red. But what really stood out was his salmon color, double-breasted suit with the unusu­ally wide lapels. They were com­pletely out of place in 1966 when men, includ­ing my father on that cold Jan­u­ary day, wore dark suits with one row of but­tons and nar­row lapels.

I sat on the pew next to my father while a man I didn’t know talked about the man lying in the cof­fin behind him, whom I had never really known, either. Off to the side, I could see the room about which my par­ents had spo­ken and caught glimpses of my grand­mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins through the opaque cur­tain that sep­a­rated us from them.

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A Visit from Uncle Ho Ho

January 31, 2010
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Share the fun­ni­est mem­ory you have of one of your sib­lings. Or, if you are an only child with­out sib­lings, share your fun­ni­est mem­ory of another mem­ber of your fam­ily. We were bored, as I remem­ber it. It was Christ­mas 1972 and we had trav­eled to Bloom­ing­ton, Min­nesota to spend the hol­i­day with my mother’s […]

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It Was Always About Fairness and Equality

January 24, 2010
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What one char­ac­ter trait of your mother’s do/did you admire most? In my mother’s eyes, it was all about fair­ness. Equal­ity. Jus­tice. Even when she took the con­cept to illog­i­cal and decid­edly unfair extremes. It’s really no won­der that I wound up being a civil rights attor­ney. Like her, I am devoted to the principles […]

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Motivated to Protect

January 17, 2010
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What one char­ac­ter trait of your father’s do/did you admire most? … Con­tin­ued from Get­ting into Trou­ble. It’s a dif­fi­cult story about a dif­fi­cult time in my life, so I have told it in a straight-forward man­ner few times over the years. I have, how­ever, dis­guised it as a hypo­thet­i­cal fact pat­tern or story about […]

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Getting into Trouble

January 10, 2010
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Recall an occa­sion when you got into trou­ble with your par­ents. Why did you get into trou­ble and how did your par­ents han­dle the sit­u­a­tion? Look­ing back, do you agree with their approach? How would you han­dle the same sit­u­a­tion dif­fer­ently with your own child(ren)? His name was Reg­gie and I had never known anyone […]

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Writing My Life: Getting Into Trouble

January 1, 2010
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It’s the first day of the New Year! Some kids or young adults might find them­selves in a bit of “hot water” with their par­ents today, depend­ing on how they cel­e­brated New Year’s Eve. So, for the first prompt, what bet­ter topic to invite you to write about than your own his­tory of mis­chief? Recall […]

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