I’ve been wondering why milestones make us so sad and anxious. After all, getting to the next milestone is something we pray for, plan for, and work on. Successfully reaching one should be unmitigated joy. But, it’s not.

This weekend we’re celebrating the graduation of our oldest grandchild from high school. In a couple of weeks he’ll begin college, working on yet another milestone. It seems that life is like that, endings and beginnings, one after another.

He’s going out into the world better prepared than I was. His education is much better. I had to quit helping him with his math his sophomore year — and I’m not sure he needed the help then. He’s much more suited to the world he’s entering, a young man with a technological bent living in a technological world. Smart, aware, and capable of dealing with the hundreds of inputs that today’s society thrusts on us. By rights, he’s ready.

Yet I celebrate with a strong streak of sadness and some apprehension.

Part of it is something we’ve been dealing with for years. All those things that we hang onto even as the kids grow out of them. There was a time whenever he saw me, he ran up and jumped into my arms. He doesn’t do that anymore; he’s too big and his beard would be scratchy. I had to give that up years ago, but I’ll always remember it.

And I’ll remember the time, at a point in his young life when his tastes had outrun his words, when he stood beside the bed, asking for coffee. Then he wanted to go out on the deck. We took our coffee outside, sitting and sipping and staring into the back yard. He looked up at me, nodded, and said with great solemnity, “Nice day.” He was about three. It’s a day I won’t forget, but cannot recreate. It can’t happen again.

However, it’s deeper and more profound than that. I believe it’s because each milestone is a demarcation between past and future. The past, no matter whether it was pleasant or not, is certain. As one of the current cliché’s has it, “it is what it is.” It requires nothing more of us, no decisions, and no wonderings.

The future, on the other hand, is nothing but uncertainty, and I realize that Scooter is going out into a world far more bewildering than the one I entered nearly sixty years ago. Common standards that I thought were cast in concrete have not only crumbled, but the dust has disappeared. Clear cut paths that we were expected to follow (and did follow) just aren’t there anymore. Compared to the world that he’s entering, mine had no questions at all.

Which leaves me with little that is useful to offer him as he steps off into his new world. In his eighteen years, he’s come to expect some sort of sermonizing from PopPop on important occasions (and on some occasions not so important). He’s endured them with more grace than could reasonably expected of a growing boy. So I’ve been trying to think of what I should tell him in the last sermon he’ll hear from me as — by any definition — a child.

I won’t ask him to go and make us proud. That’s not really his job, but I will ask him to make himself proud, to set good and challenging objectives and do everything he can to meet them. I’ll ask him to develop and adhere to a creed that lives up to a word we’ve almost forgotten: honorable. I’ll ask him to make choices with an eye toward ramifications. Too many people are still suffering the effects of the philosophy that preached “if it feels good, do it.”

And I’ll give him my definition of success. It’s changed a lot over the years. At some points, it had to do with money. At others, it had to do with just getting through the day. But, for some years now, it’s been pretty constant. It’s to be able, when you’re old, to look back on the totality of your life and honestly tell yourself, “You didn’t do so bad after all.”

Godspeed, Scooter. If you haven’t encountered that archaic Old English word in your years of schooling, look it up. It’s absolutely appropriate to the occasion.

Our hopes and prayers go with you and will so long as we hope and pray.