My son graduated from his Kansas middle school this week. Too bad the world stinks to high heaven.

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23-05-2025

The columnist's son, Baxter, runs across a field in New Hampshire in September 2013. He just graduated from middle school this week. (Clay Wirestone/Kansas Reflector)
My eighth grader graduated from middle school on Wednesday, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
You raise a child, care for them for years as they can barely speak or take care of themselves, and then they go and grow up. Our son now looms over my husband. He's nearly my height. And he shows disturbing signs of independent thought.
That's a joke, of course. Still, sitting in a packed gymnasium proved unexpectedly emotional. I was watching my child grow up, along with more than 200 of his peers.
I watched for others who couldn't be there. My mother died 14 years ago this June, three months after our son was born. She was so excited to see pictures, to chat via videoconference. At the time, we lived in New Hampshire, while she lived in Kansas. She was never able to meet her grandson in person. And she was never able to tell me how quickly the time passes from late elementary school to the end of middle school — how in the space of three or four years, a little kid transforms into a towering teen.
I wish she could be there. But like much that we wish for ourselves and our loved ones and our lives, that's not possible. My brother and sister were there, though, and they supported and congratulated their nephew after the ceremony.
We take life's moments as they come, enjoy what we can, and move forward.
Scanning social media, a message stood out. Paraphrased, the meme stated that grief encompasses more than sadness after someone passes away. We grieve when we lose something, and that needn't be a life. We can grieve friendships, careers, politics, the passage of time.
I have felt so much grief over the past couple of years, grief that at times threatens to overwhelm me.
I have grieved watching state politics, as LGBTQ+ Kansans were ruthlessly targeted by lawmakers. I have grieved as institutions once thought unassailable, impervious to tampering, shuddered in the face of dime-store authoritarianism. I have grieved as I realized that I'm no longer the twentysomething who bounced right back from setbacks and disappointments. I have grieved watching others around me mourn the loss of a society they thought they understood.
At one time, I believed that age strengthened you. That as the years pass, you grow stronger and better equipped to face the world. I'm not sure that's true. If anything, in recent days I've felt more vulnerable, more fearful, more uncertain.
All that mourning makes celebration difficult. My son heads to high school in a profoundly unsettled time, one in which politics and technology and social upheaval pose existential threats. I want to protect him. I want to vanquish these griefs, for his generation if not for my own.
Yet as I just write, that's not possible. We live how we live and we have what we have. We can try our best — I can try my best — and the world around us still falls short.
Others have departed recently, others whose perspective and wisdom I would have valued. My former colleague at the University Daily Kansan, Andy Obermueller, would have offered dry and cynical takes. My former bosses and friends at the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire, Mike Pride and Mark Travis, would have drawn on their journalistic wisdom. My high school history teacher, Robert Nellis, would have cited battles from World War II.
The world would better and stronger if all these men were still in it.
But I can't leave this column in a pit of despair. My mother didn't raise me that way.
We still live in a nation of wealth and opportunity. We still live in a state packed with caring, creative people of all ages. We can still make changes for the better, even if they do only a fraction of what we imagine.
I don't know what the future brings. I do know, however, the love I feel for my son and family. I know how much love my mother, gone these many years, felt for us. Love may not make the world go round. It may not solve societal problems. But our lives don't amount to much without it.
Despite my grief these past years, I've also found incredible joy. My husband and child help with that, of course. So do the multitudes of Kansas Reflector readers who have attended our town halls, sent along email messages of support and opened our newsletters every morning. So does the recognition that we all of us share the gift of existence, forming another link on the great chain of human life from the far past to the distant future.
An small, ceramic urn of my mother's ashes sits on a bookcase in our living room. When I told my son that I was going to write about his graduation, and that I was sad his grandmother couldn't be there, he replied immediately.
'She could have been there,' he said. 'You just needed to carry her in.'
I chuckled, but of course he was right. I could have. I just wasn't looking at the situation the right way.
Amid whatever mourning and grief we carry right now, let's find a way to celebrate milestones while remembering those who brought us here. And may that whole ball of emotion, bound together by love, bounce us into whatever future comes.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.