Moving Forward
First off, I would like to apologize, again, for missing a day. I am really really hoping that won’t happen anymore, but you never can tell with life,apparently. This weeks excuse is the same as the other excuses I’ve used this month, I was at a funeral for a dear friend and practical family member. She basically adopted my in-laws as her own and me along with them. It’s been a really hard month.
So as I sit in my comfy chair this morning in my new house with my cats playing with packing paper that hasn’t been rounded up yet, I am faced with the task of moving forward. That’s what we do. We’ve said our goodbyes, the public mourning is over and we are left to pick up the pieces of life that have been scattered and reassemble them into something around that missing piece. It’s hard, and we were just starting to put the glue on the edge of the first piece from Mac’s passing when the whole lot of them were knocked out of our hands and Dorey was picked out. It’s been an exhausting month.
I never liked the term “moving on.” I wrote about this after my aunt died last January. “Moving on” sounds like you’re leaving them behind, it somehow implies a disregard for what happened. People move on from a break-up, they move on from an occupation, from a job that didn’t go right. “Oh well, that didn’t work out, time to move on.” You don’t do that to a person you loved, to a person you’ve lost. You don’t “move on” with your life like they didn’t work out. I prefer the term, “moving forward.” I’m putting one foot in front of the other and taking it a day at a time and moving forward with the life I have now that’s reshaping to accommodate the Dorey shaped hole, the Mac shaped hole. Moving forward doesn’t leave them behind. We’ll carry them with us until we see them again in heaven. Moving forward isn’t a change of plans because something went wrong, it’s going on with life, as they would have wanted, because they would have wanted it to.
Now that I’ve spilled that all over you, there is the question of “how?” How do I move forward from a month full of loss? Right now I have cats. After Mac we had the move. It was something to focus on, something to keep us busy as we processed the grief. Right now it’s having cats in the house for the first time. I’ve never been on my own with cats. My sister was always very insistent that the cats were hers back home so she was the one who was supposed to take care of them. Logan would help with the cats growing up, but only when told, not on his own. We’ve never been solely responsible for tiny cat lives before, so this is our current adventure.
Some things will always be hard; this first year, especially so. Summer will come and we’ll deal with the fact that two of our most beloveds aren’t here to enjoy it with us, won’t be here for the Manchester summer picnic, or birthdays or holidays. Christmas will come and it’ll be harder still to fathom the days surrounding it without them. I could say that it’ll get easier as time goes on, or that we’ll get used to those missing pieces, but I don’t know that that’s true. We’ll learn to deal with them, I think, learn to live with the grief that comes with the losses and learn to move forward like that. It will be an adventure, I’m sure.
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