For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for August 23, 2014

I feel badly for Michael as I know the feeling. We moved a Lot when I was a child, twice cross-country. I am glad Michael can talk to his Mom about this. It is very difficult to lose a best friend at his age without some support. ;)

Lynn really captured the feeling of loss..

Until you meet Deanna.Oh, sorry, spoiler alert!

Well, I guess we who haven’t been reading this forever will just wait & see!!!

My friend moved away in 1980 and I still miss him till this day.

Lynn’s notes:

I wanted to explore the sense of loss we all share when a good friend moves away. I think this must be harder for children to deal with. In our case, we were the ones who left and Aaron’s friends were sad to see him go. It wasn’t until we had settled in our new house and the excitement of moving was over, that he began to feel the loss as well.

Duck, thank you for the response yesterday. While I agree that Elly mentioned “folks”, implying they were local, I disagree about one of your other points. In yesterday’s strip Connie says she has never driven that far before, not that she had never been that far away before.I looked up the “future” (2/1/99) strip in the collection book “The Big 5-0”, and you are right about that one too. I had thought it might have been from Liz’s college years and therefore in a different town, but it was not.Honestly, the discrepancies don’t bother me, I enjoy the strip on a day to day basis. Lynn’s imagination and talent amaze and delight me. If she chose to codify Connie’s (and Lawrence’s) background later without regard to some of these earlier strips, it is her privilege. After all, she is their creator and this was a very long-running strip.

Raising a family in the military, this really hist home. It put me in my children’s and wife’s shoes. Tough on them.

You’ll feel empty forever and ever, falling into a feedback-loop death spiral of unending depression…Oh, sorry—I was thinking of the Funkyverse; Johnston will move on to a new storyline in a few days.

I really like the word-play on this strip :) I think we’ve all felt this way at some point in our lives.

If you feel that empty, kid, you should have gotten up early enough to tell him goodbye.

A very touching moment! Time softens things, but never completely.