Mom's halo shines in our memories

Over the past three weeks, more times than I can count, I have spoken to people who walked with my mother on the trail at H.V. Griffin Park or the upstairs track at Shelbyville Recreation Center.

Actually, it's inaccurate to say they walked "with" her. What they all recall is being passed by her.

It's an old and familiar story to the Carney family. We would be at the mall, or somewhere like that, and Mom would be out in front of everyone, causing my father to call out, "Carrie, this isn't a race."

And then, on August 15, she ran off ahead of us once again.

This time, she isn't coming back.

The doctors told us that she probably had cancer for a year or so. But it wasn't identified as such until this summer. On July 14, the morning I was scheduled to leave for a 10-day mission trip to Kenya, my father spoke to my sister and me in the sun room of their home. The cancer was inoperable, he said.

The doctors hoped to relieve her pain and strengthen her enough so that they could start chemotherapy. The chemo would buy her a little time -- six months? Two years? No one knew. But she might be able to travel to North Carolina to see the two out-of-state grandkids, and maybe take other trips as well.

Dad had to break the news to our two brothers -- one in North Carolina, the other in Iraq -- by telephone.

But Mom's condition never improved, and the chemo never started. I left for Kenya -- Mom would not have wanted it any other way -- and returned to find her in even more pain than when I'd left. My brother in Iraq returned the same day I got back from my Kenya trip, and he must have been even more shocked. The next three weeks were agony for Mom, and a trial for my father and my sister, who took time off from her job to stay with them in the hospital. I kept going to work, sometimes driving in to the hospital or going to my parents' house to feed the cats, and feeling guilty that I wasn't doing something more. My North Carolina brother, of course, was even more frustrated at not being able to help.

Finally, Mom was sent home under hospice care, and a little more than a week later she was gone. My mother, her mother, and my mother's sister (and only full sibling) all died within 15 months of each other -- Grandmother in May 2009, Aunt Juanita in January of this year.

It still doesn't seem real. My father (they were married for 51 years) wakes up every morning in a sad and empty home, but I am just enough removed that it hasn't quite sunk in. I keep expecting to see her. I went to Walmart one day, and there was a display of bargain-priced Disney movies at the checkout, and I saw one of the old "Herbie the Love Bug" movies, which she loved, and I thought -- just for a second -- Hey, I ought to buy that for Mom.

My mother knitted afghans -- each of her children has at least one, and her grandchildren as well. A purple one, in keeping with her proud membership in the Red Hat Society, served as her pall.

I have two of them. One is in several shades of blue, my college color, knitted to remind me of home during those first years of being on my own and 12 hours away in Tulsa. The other one is green -- I got it years later and I'm ashamed to say don't remember the exact occasion.

We have afghans to remember her by, and photos, but mostly what we have, to console us in whatever stage of grief, are the memories. On the night of mother's visitation -- it was also Dad's 73rd birthday, shot full of holes -- more than 700 people filed through Hillcrest Funeral Home. People waited in line for 90 minutes or more to see her and to comfort her husband and children. Some couldn't wait that long and had to send their apologies later.

Mom touched a lot of lives, in a lot of different roles. She was, of course, a pastor's wife. My father served a variety of churches over three decades, and as anyone can tell you a pastor and spouse are a team. A good pastor's spouse must be active, but not overbearing; present, but not intrusive. My mother was, as more than one person told me that night, "the perfect pastor's wife." There were people there from many of the churches my father pastored before his retirement, and they all loved her as much as they loved him.

But to define her only in that role would be to stop short. There were people who knew Carrie Carney for her own work at First National Bank and later the school system's maintenance office, and for her volunteer work at Heritage Medical Center. There were people who knew her from the Red Hats, from Shelbyville Woman's Club, from Butler's Creek FCE Club.

There were also a lot of people whom she passed on the walking trail.

Many of them spoke about her kindness, her sunny disposition, her gentle spirit. She was always supporting, encouraging, giving.

My mother died at about 5:30 on a Sunday evening. A few hours earlier, as I sat in the pew at First United Methodist, the Rev. Lloyd Doyle spoke about the difference between round and square halos in religious iconography.

Deceased saints were portrayed, in medieval Christian artwork, with round halos. Living saints were portrayed with square halos.

Later that day, as my mother's halo turned from square to round, God said, "Well done, good and faithful servant."

My father, her life partner for half a century, feels the loss most deeply and in a way none of the rest of us can understand or relate to. We accept that, and hate to see him suffer just as we hated to see her suffer those last few weeks. He is always in our prayers and thoughts. But he, like the rest of us, will have to settle for the memories. And they are great memories.

One of my favorite novels, John Irving's "A Prayer For Owen Meany," ends with the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright, expressing his grief over the loss of his childhood friend, the title character, who has died heroically saving a room full of people, not to mention Wheelwright himself.

"O God, please give him back!" says Wheelwright. "I shall keep asking You."

I used to think it was a silly and self-indulgent request. Life, after all, is life, and death is inevitable, and those of us with faith believe we will be reunited eventually.

But that doesn't make it hurt any less.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.