Graduation is time to reflect and juggle regrets

It’s college graduation month, time of reunions and reflections, an ending and a commencement, and as good a moment as any to take stock. To watch a child go out into the world is to know that there is no hiding from the real measure of your life.

If, as I did, you had a daughter graduating from the University of Southern California, you had to get used to the instant response — ‘‘How much did you pay to get her in?’’ — much as anyone plying my craft these days must grow accustomed to ‘‘Oh, yeah, fake news!’’ Yuck.

USC has, of course, been Exhibit A in the college admissions scandal, that squalid parable of a statusobsessed age. A number of

very rich people saw no moral issue with paying millions of dollars to get their underperforming children through the side door into top schools. How, after all, could they attend a party without being able to let drop that Henry or Ella is now at Yale?

That would be unthinkable.

I am not going to expend any outrage on this. A lot of people are turning inward at this juncture. There’s so much noise, so much hysteria, so much hatred, so much pettiness, so much falseness, so much intolerance, so much that’s stomach turning — and all of it public! The only refuge is inwardness. Nobody can rob you of that.

It was the youngest of my four children who was graduating, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would find myself gripped by sobs. Tears flow freely in my family. Still, what was this? I felt time hurrying on, accelerating toward the exit. I felt pride in her achievement and joy in her radiance. I thought of the long and winding road from her birthplace in Paris to California. I remembered her at her bat mitzvah telling everyone she disagreed with God, and I thought of my parents, now gone, laughing at that. This baby of mine has never been one to sugarcoat her views.

There was something more to those tears: remorse. I could have been a better dad, more present, more patient, more understanding, less consumed by the next deadline. Yes, I could. It’s not what school a child goes to that makes the difference, it’s the amount of love a child receives that builds the surest foundation for happiness. Not for success, however that is measured, but for happiness.

Sure, I could have done worse, but that’s no excuse. There’s no point in taking stock unless it’s unsparing; and there’s no other way to change.

Times change. When I graduated from Oxford with a second-class degree, having gotten a scholarship to my high school and an Exhibition to Balliol College for academic excellence, my father called me into his office at Guy’s Hospital in London. ‘‘This is the first time in life that you’ve failed,’’ he said. He was referring to the fact that I had not gotten a first-class degree.

His verdict crushed me, but I have forgiven him. To be a parent is to fall short. What’s unforgivable is not to strive to do better.

Jonathan Kellerman, a novelist and psychologist, was the commencement speaker at USC’S Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, attended by my daughter. Kellerman, a USC alum, summed up the wisdom he’d gleaned from ingesting countless psychological tomes: ‘‘Be nice.’’ That put me in mind of a line sometimes attributed to Plato: ‘‘Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.’’

Everyone is. Life is a riddle whose only imperfect solution is love. Love cheats time because it’s passed along, refracted through the generations; and it’s the reason, with all its illusions, that we’re here in the first place.

All four of my children, whom I love beyond words, having traveled from as far afield as Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, were there in the house we rented for a few days in Los Angeles, along with my ex-wife, whom I love; and her beloved parents, one of them a Holocaust survivor who got through the war in Poland in hiding after her mother had been ripped from her and taken to the gas chamber.

One memory above all: my four kids at the kitchen counter doing something we all love — preparing food — with music playing, dancing, laughing, strong, together. It felt intense, beautiful; and it had something to do with my hard-earned capacity for remorse.

It’s never too late to grow or to love.