I've been grading papers all day.


My students were to write about that invisible line, that demarcation line between childhood and adulthood. I've read graduation-from-high-school stories, breakup stories, money worry stories. Also in there have been alcoholism, abuse, and death stories.

It's a challenging assignment--and certainly there are many lines in our lives, the number increasing as we age. When was I a child? When did I cross that line?

One student's story about the death of his grandfather was compelling. He was four at the time and every morning would fill his bowl with Fruit Loops, head down the hall and climb on his grandfather's bed and watch early morning cartoons with him. One morning, his grandfather didn't wake up, so he summoned his father. It was the last time he saw his grandfather. His parents kept the death from him at the time, but just after his fifth birthday he said to his father "I don't think Grandfather loves me at all. He didn't even come to my birthday party."

I'm not usually moved by the stories written for my class. I practice keeping my objective brain going--sorting out the fragments, the vague pronoun references, keeping track of the evidence and support for their thesis. But this one stopped me in my tracks, as I could hear one of my grandchildren's voices--Alex came to mind initially--asking this.

Sometimes I think I'm tooling along pretty well, dodging the big bullets of health issues, keeping the depression in the background, juggling work and family and service. But after reading this essay I sat and looked out the window, remembering my mother's phone call to me some years ago, at the end of my grandmother's life.

I was the first call she made to one of her children. She identified herself, fell silent, then said, "My mother's gone." We were both quiet then, struggling to speak through our emotion. Her voice broke as she described for me the ending, the last breath.

While I can point to many lines of demarcation in my adult life--having children, finding true love, learning not to spend everything in my pocket, working on complex relationships, taking responsibility when I don't want to, completing a difficult task, grandchildren arriving, an advanced degree--I realize that all my tooling along will come to a noisy crashing when my parents leave this earth. I don't wish for it, I hardly mention it--as my mother says, it's the unthinkable--for they have been my mainstay, my support in countless ways over many many years.

And even though I will have adult understanding, I will be like this small child, his longing so evident, so tangible.

Another line to cross.