by Kevin Burton
“And when one of us is gone, and one of us is left to carry on, then remembering will have to do..”
“You and Me Against The World”
Helen Reddy
The first song I played after learning of my mother’s death on May 4, was “First Morning In Heaven,” by The Imperials. That’s an up-tempo number with banjos on it, which expressed how I wanted to feel.
I promised Mom that I would celebrate her graduation into glory with some gusto, but maybe not right away.
The second song I played was the one I just borrowed from, above. The Helen Reddy song is about a child and his mother. So that didn’t fit, but parts of it hit home.
Reddy uses “gone” and “carry on” together, thereby providing both rhyme and reason for my immediate future. But some definitions are in order.
“Gone” means gone from the physical world. It means no more trips to the nursing home for me. It means no more holding that gnarled left hand (“half a hand” she called it).
Thanks be to God there is a spiritual realm. And because my mother and I both received salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and his substitutionary death on a Roman cross, she and I will see each other again.
So gone doesn’t quite mean all the way gone.
Gone is the easy part. It’s the carry on part I have not yet defined.
I have noticed in my post-loss world, an interim period coming in two parts. The first part was the funeral-viewing-planning notifications, part.
The next part is what does life look like. This is the “carry on” portion.
I have been resilient in life more often than not. But when I say more often than not, unfortunately I don’t mean 90 or 95 percent of the time. I mean maybe two thirds of the time. In other words, there is some quit in me.
And this would be a prime time for quitting. Mom’s death is the hardest blow I have faced so far, in terms of how close the person was to me and how much a part of my daily life.
Because I knew her time was short, I visited Mom a lot and talked to her a lot by phone. There were maybe seven or eight days I did not talk to her in the last seven years of her life. And being the old newspaper reporter I am, I wrote a lot of it down.
So I have pieced together a benediction of hers, for me. So the parts of me that want to quit, just can’t do it.
But how to carry on?
How do you think it makes me feel, to drink the little bottles of orange juice I bought and intended for Mom, to nourish her, to bring her life?
Well don’t deny the feeling, but drink the juice for sure. Mom wanted good things for me just as I wanted them for her. That’s part of “carry on” but that’s one of the easier calls.
And I will pick up her mantle as a San Antonio Spurs basketball fan. They are having a good season but it looks as if they might fall just short of being champions.
If Mom had moved to Montreal instead of to Heaven, I would be learning French right now, preparing to be with her. In the same way I need to focus on that finish line I wrote about Sunday. We need to, as they used to say on one of the radio ministries I listened to, “turn our hearts toward home.” That’s part of “carry on.”
I’m not close to having this all put together.
Most importantly though, God help me if I try to figure out “carry on” in my own thoughts, without being led by the Holy Spirit.
By all means let me not go through all this and be unchanged, unmotivated, unenergized spiritually.
Back to the song lyrics. They say “when one of us is gone,” not “if.” This time was always going to come. Every day, thousands of people enter the season of life I am in now.
If that is you, know that I am praying for you and standing with you.
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