Moving Day

It is moving day in my family. My sons are leaving the home they have lived in all their lives. In their twenties and thirties this is not a small leave taking. It is a move necessitated by time and circumstances. They had shared this place with their father. His death three and a half months ago precipitated this new change in their lives.

Moving therefore, has been on my mind. Life brings all kinds of moves. We move in, we move out, we move around, sometimes as though in circles, but movement is the motion of life. As the earth moves so do our bodies and souls.

I've watched my sons prepare for this change. They went right up to the end before attacking the huge task of packing. One of them loves the things of his father. The old books, the old records, the stuff of his Dad's mind. He loves to keep things. Just like his father. I suspect we hold on to these things, as if treasures, so as not to fully let go of the person who was so soon ago right there, laughing, giving life directions, being a pain in the neck, being real.

The other, a bit more pragmatic but just as much pained by his loss approaches it in his own way. He is the truck driver, the let's get rid of this, let's take this decision maker. It seems he does this with barely a glance. But my mother's eyes see him wince each time a closet is opened or a box is closed. The sweetness and the burden of memory is very present. Like his brother he does love the things of his father and I hope he remembers to take Dad's fifty year old scout shirt that he wears like a badge of honour and will never wash lest it too disappear.

We have talked before and after their father's death of the complexity and yet the simplicity of it all. "Big Al" lived his whole life believing in God. He knew and fully accepted that we are born, we live, and then we die. All the while we belong not to ourselves or to one another, but to God. He fully believed this is the great circle of God's creation of us.

The transcendence of what their father taught them will help them in countless ways as they start this new day in their lives. It will help me too. They live so close to me that I can see the light on at night and know that they are safely home. In the nights to come it will be dark. The good thing is that I will be able to tell them how much I will miss them, how in the ways of God, forever I am very near, and that their Pappy is with them too and perhaps glad he has not had to pack. He could move peacefully toward death but packing would have driven him crazy.

I'm cooking a meal for the journey. They can take that to their new home. I won't give them advice. Our parenting, so rooted in faith, has given them inescapable treasures deep within them. They will know, as Henri Nouwen said... When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope. And so it is that we begin our leave taking and move toward yet another new day. I wonder what it will bring.