The graduates have all walked. I’ve gone on my trip and returned. It’s back to the business of finishing up the school year for my son and getting ready for summer camps and family reunion trips and enjoying the summer.

But I find myself pondering a few deeper things with my return home on Monday. It turns out this was not just a trip to see my nephew graduate, like I thought. This was a trip to look at the cycle of life; of endings and beginnings.

Here he is, Logan the high school graduate. With honors, I might add. Eighteen years ago this month, he was born. As it is for any graduate, this milestone is an ending of the life he’s known up to now, and a beginning of the next phase. College. Adulthood. There is so much in store for him.

Eighteen years ago this year, a few months after Logan was born, my Dad passed away suddenly. My brother Ryan was a senior in high school at the time, ready to go through his own endings and beginnings. But his cycle, all of our family’s cycle, was abruptly changed and redefined. As we laid my father to rest in the shadow of the mountains he so loved, we marked the ending of his life as well as a new beginning. It was the beginning of life without Dad.

In a couple of months, Ryan and his wife Darcy are expecting their first child. A little girl, they are naming Suvi. Another beginning, a new life to celebrate and love. (That’s my brother in the middle, and Darcy on the right, as our family waits for Logan’s graduation to start.)

I hope, eighteen years from now, to be at Suvi’s graduation, celebrating the cycle once again.

I must admit, after this trip I find myself wondering what endings and beginnings are in store for us, in the meantime.