All living things move.  I remember learning this in my high school and college science classes.  The movement may be incredibly small or imperceptibly slow, but the movement is there.   And so my family finds itself in a place of movement.
One daughter and son are moving UP – moving to a new northern home, over 1300 miles away, courtesy of the United States Coast Guard.  It’s an exciting time that they’ve anticipated for several years, and will probably be their home for the next three years.  For them this will mean new jobs, new friends, new church and new routines.  Not to mention new weather.  Rather than eight months of heat they will be living in eight months of cold temperatures.  There will be snow tires and snow plows in their future, and they will be trading in their flip-flops for snow boots.
Another daughter and son are moving OVER – moving over to the next county to a brand new home.  It’s an exciting time to move into a home they’ve been working on for the last year, after lots of planning and budgeting and thousands of decisions.  It’s a dream come true as they’ve outgrown their current home.  For them this will mean a new neighborhood and some new routines, but the luxury of keeping their same jobs, church and friends.  It will be nice that they remain only a two hour drive away.
For all of us, we are moving ON – moving on to a life of new milestones and memory-making.  As we approach the second anniversary of Michael’s death, we look forward more often than we look back.  More and more we create family memories that Michael is not a part of.  Family vacations and celebrations which he cannot attend.  New experiences that we would love to have him here for – for his humor and his wisdom, for his uncanny way of putting people together to accomplish the goals before us.  But the choice was not ours.  Yes, we are moving on.
(Just for the record, if someone had said to me a year ago that “life goes on”, I may have punched them in the nose.  Just go back to some of my early blog rants about the things people say if you want to hear my outrage.)
Yes, it’s true.  Live goes on and we move on.  It’s not that we have forgotten the ones we love or no longer miss them.  We certainly do miss their presence with us.  But we carry them in our minds and hearts everywhere we go.  We sometimes talk to them as if they are here, and we imagine how they would respond in different situations.
It’s not the same, and it’s not what we would choose.  But we are living creatures and all living creatures move.