It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day — 
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled — since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take — the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show — 
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
~C. Day Lewis “Walking Away” from Complete Poems

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
~ Frederick Buechner

Once again I bid goodbye, if only for a little while.  It never gets easier to part from one’s family members when they are called to be far away.

I began writing regularly over twenty years ago to consider more deeply my time left on this earth and what my family meant to me, here and now, and for eternity. Family is carried inside the words I write without often writing about them directly. They inspire and challenge me; they love and stretch me. As our children married, then were blessed with children of their own, I know they are sustained by what they have carried away from this home as each drifted away.

Life is about nurture – helping the cherished seeds you carried deep inside to thrive when let go.  Then we can never really be lonely; our hearts never empty.  We stay connected, one another, forever, even when miles and miles and lifetimes apart.