Opinion | Reflections on the Graduation of My Daughter

One of the pleasures of growing older is the shedding of ambition.

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 U.S.C.’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, attended by my daughter. Kellerman, a U.S.C. 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. Another slender thread: Krakow to L.A. by way of Brazil.

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.

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