The Last Walk Across the Floor

This morning is dawning with a clear sky and the promise of a great start to planting season for us. We have some ground fit for planting and we are gathering the troops to begin dropping seeds in the ground.  I am enjoying a new roast of coffee this morning, bolder and darker than usual.  The new brew matches the heaviness of what my mind is grappling with this morning as the sun rises over the horizon as I sit on the patio.

Yesterday I was deep into working on my computer, posting and sharing to my various platforms, when I was stopped in my tracks, hit with a baseball bat to the forehead by a post from a mourning parent.

A father had shared a short video, maybe twenty seconds long, of his son walking across a gym floor to receive a high honors certificate. Consecutive semesters. The caption said this was the last accomplishment his son had in 2025 before he passed two months later. The final line read: "Father misses you terribly."

I know that boy.

His name was Donovan. He was one of my Webelos Scouts. I was his Den Leader for two years and helped him cross over into his Boy Scout troop. I wrote about him last July, not long after my fifteen-year-old came home and told me one of his troop mates had died. That news hit hard. What came next hit harder. The young man about to start his sophomore year was one of mine.

In one of our last conversations, Donovan told me he wanted to be a nuclear engineer. It was the kind of goal you hear from a kid and you just nod and think, yes, that one will do it. He had that kind of mind and that kind of drive. I was looking forward to watching him grow into it.

I had also hoped to see him this fall at a marching band competition. He marched with the Snider High School band. With my own son in the Leo band, I figured our paths might cross at some point. I had already pictured it, scanning the sea of black and yellow in the stands, looking for that familiar face. That moment is not going to happen.

What stopped me cold about that father's post was not just the grief in it, though the grief is immense. It was the word last. That gymnasium was just a school night. Parents in folding chairs, somebody running a camera on a phone, kids walking across the floor in a line. Nobody in that room knew it was the last time. Donovan did not know. His father did not know. It was just Tuesday.

Now that Tuesday is everything.

The father wrote that Donovan had an incredible résumé, not just on paper, but as a human being and what he stood for. That line stayed with me. Most of us spend a lot of energy building the paper résumé, the credentials and the accomplishments and the titles. Donovan was building both, and he was doing it at fifteen.

Grief does not respect the calendar. That father posting a video nearly a year later is not falling apart. He is holding on. He is making sure his son is not forgotten, that the walk across that gym floor still counts for something, that the world knows Donovan was here and that he was extraordinary.

He was.

Hug your kids tonight. Call your parents. Tell the people in your life what they mean to you before Tuesday becomes everything.