by Jo Strausz Rosen
July 3, 2025
I’ve been thinking about graduation. Not the kind with caps tossed in the air and tassels flipped from right to left, but the quieter, more personal ones. The ones that don’t come with diplomas. The ones no one claps for. The ones we carry in our hearts.
We usually think of graduation as a moment of celebration, a proud walk into the next chapter. But most of life’s real graduations don’t come with applause. They happen quietly. Often painfully. And they require something deeper than a diploma: a hard conversation with ourselves, and sometimes with someone we love.
When I left home, it didn’t feel ceremonial. I packed big duffle bags, left my childhood house, and stepped into the cement brick college dorm that didn’t smell like comfort…yet somehow grew to feel like home. That was a graduation…from childhood into independence.
There have been others since.
Saying yes to love five years later and slowly letting go of the single version of me that lived alone. Becoming a parent at 27 and again, years later, letting my children go. Sitting in a quiet, too-still house, and realizing I had graduated from daily motherhood into something quieter, softer, and yes, lonelier, until I found myself in a career that changed my life.
There are so many graduations in a single life: leaving a job we’ve outgrown, saying goodbye to a house filled with memories, entering Senior Independent Living and then possibly assisted living…not just out of necessity, but because it’s time to be cared for instead of always doing the caring.
The stages of aging are among the most profound graduations we experience. Each phase asks us to release something: youth, roles, identities, even physical abilities. And in return, we’re offered something new: wisdom, perspective, presence, and often a deeper sense of self.
We graduate into adulthood in layers, with every move, every first job, every failure. With every loss that teaches us something we never asked to learn. The strange thing is, we rarely honor these transitions. We move through them without ceremony, without acknowledgment. We tell ourselves it’s just part of life. And it is. But maybe we need ceremony because it’s part of life. Maybe we need to pause and say: This was meaningful. This was hard. This is worth recognizing.
Aging brings even more of these graduations. Some are quiet like the first time we feel invisible in a room that once lit up for us…or the day our hands look like our mother’s. Or when we begin moving more slowly, not just because we must, but because we choose to savor every moment.
Some transitions are proud like retiring and realizing our worth was never just our work. Or downsizing and letting go of things to make space for time.
And some of these moments are truly sacred like the wisdom that arrives not in grand epiphanies, but in simple clarity: I no longer need to prove myself. That I have learned the ability to sit with both joy and grief and know they can coexist. And, letting go of old roles, and finding peace in simply being.
Each of these moments begs for a conversation with ourselves: “I need help now because I’m not who I was and that’s okay.”
We rarely mark these moments…but maybe we should. Host a quiet dinner to honor what’s ending…And we can enjoy a solitary walk to say goodbye to what was…. and welcome what’s next. Because every ending holds a beginning inside it. That’s why we call it commencement.
So, here’s to the graduations we don’t discuss.
The ones without speeches or stages. The ones that reshape us. The ones we carry in our hearts.
May we learn to pause. To honor. To speak the truth…even when it’s hard.
Because that, too, is a kind of ceremony.
Every honest conversation, every act of letting go, every step forward is a graduation worth celebrating.
Shabbat Shalom.
