Ah, graduation. The proud parents. The excited graduates. The young ladies wearing shoes they won’t dare to wear in 10 years.

Every year, Suffolk News-Herald reporters are among a small group of people that attend all three public high school graduations in the same day. Along with the superintendent and School Board members, a videographer and a few police officers, we’re also racing against the clock to finish our work at one school before we move on to the next one. But unlike those other folks, we don’t get special parking spots.

I got the chance to cover the King’s Fork High School graduation on Saturday. Our education reporter covered the first two, Nansemond River and Lakeland, and I went to the last one to give her a break. I did all three in 2009, and it made for quite a long day.

On Saturday, I managed to squeeze into the gymnasium just before the doors were closed and somehow snagged a first-row seat beside the stage, on the side where the graduates would be walking up.

I landed beside a very excited mother who had specifically picked her seat so that she could set up picture frames with photos of her son’s deceased grandparents on the floor, where he could see them as he prepared to walk across the stage.

As if I weren’t already thinking of my high school graduation, her answer to my question inquiring about the frames really took me back.

Logistically, my high school graduation was quite different from King’s Fork. There were only 17 of us, compared to the 298 at King’s Fork. And, not coincidentally, mine was significantly quieter.

But, similar to that lady’s son, three of my grandparents were missing from my graduation.

My paternal grandfather died 13 years before I was born. And my maternal grandparents were absent because my grandfather had gotten sick with cancer about a month and a half before my graduation.

However, my uncle brought his video camera and taped the entire graduation for my grandparents to watch later. We also saved some of the cake from my party for my grandparents to eat. My grandfather died in October of that year.

Fortunately, both of my grandmothers were able to make it to my college graduation.

There are so many circumstances that can cause loved ones not to be able to make it to a graduation. Whether it’s illness, distance, travel arrangements going awry or simply not having enough tickets to spread around, loved ones can’t always make it to every graduation.

That’s why it’s such a good idea for Suffolk Public Schools to offer the live stream of the graduations on their website. They began this service a few years ago in response to complaints about the limited number of seats available in the school’s gymnasiums.

I hope they continue this service as a solution to the limited seating and other things precluding folks from getting to Suffolk on this special occasion for the graduates.