Moving With
Can we talk about Moving On? Because I don’t think that’s something people do. Ever. I’m not just talking about our situation, moving on after a horrific tragedy. I’m talking about any situation. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say human beings who have any sort of empathy NEVER move on.
Hear me out. Two weeks after we lost our son, we moved to Tennessee to be closer to our daughter-in-law and three grandsons. Our second son moved his family to Tennessee as well. In the past month, we — my husband and I, our son and his family, our daughter-in-law and three grandsons — have all moved to different states.
Friends have said to me, “It’s good for you to be home. Time for you all to move on.”
I know they mean well, but for some reason, the inference that our relocation back to Florida would allow us to move on made me want to hit them with a brick.
So I thought about it. At first, I thought, ok, they just don’t get that this is one of those things you NEVER move on from. I thought: I moved on freshman year in high school after I didn’t make junior varsity cheerleading. I moved on when I didn’t get the job I wanted right out of college. But then I thought some more. No. I didn’t move on. I moved forward, sure. But I moved forward as a new person. I was a little less cocky about my cartwheels. I was a little more self-aware of my lack of experience in the working world. But I didn’t move on. I moved forward, forged by the events that forced change in my life.
To me, moving on implies leaving it all behind. We don’t do that. We learn. We move forward WITH the experiences that forced the move in the first place.
This is what I found after losing Little Steve: I’m not going to move on. How could I possibly? But I have to move. As tempting as it is to stay in bed all day and cry, we can’t. Too many depend on us. We have to continue to live. We have to move.
The 4th is our family holiday, and we gathered together. For the second year, Steve was not with us. We miss him so much. But we will never move on; we will never leave him behind. Just as his presence made us different people, his absence does as well. And now, we keep Steve close, in our hearts, in our thoughts, in all we do. We move forward. With him.