John Lennon nowadays is remembered less as St. John the Martyr than as the villain of Beatles lore–the obscenely-wealthy hypocrite who sanctimoniously sang “Imagine no possessions” while buying out entire Manhattan apartment complexes, the cruel band-leader who drove Ringo Starr to tears, and the unrepentant wife-beater who co-wrote “All You Need Is Love” without the slightest shred of self-awareness. While I’m glad he became a doting husband and father to Yoko^[1]Whom I at least now have the maturity to no longer blame for the Beatles break-up. and Sean, it doesn’t make up for how he abused Cynthia and neglected Julian.^[2]Who was completely within his rights to entitle his first single “Too Late For Goodbyes“. His first marriage clearly needed to end (albeit more for her sake than his), just as the Beatles clearly needed to break up–but he didn’t need to be such a narcissistic prick about either. He is very much my personal Exhibit A for how one must forever separate the art from the artist.

Nevertheless, I still have some lingering affection for Lennon’s solo career, for one very simple reason: he had an uncomplicated relationship with his mother Julia, whom he loved while she was alive, and was sad when she died.

Contrast that with how so many other of his Classic Rock peers caricatured their mothers: how The Doors for example featured a rather eye-rollingly obvious Oedipal allusion on their 10-minute psychedelic dirge “The End“^[3]“Father, yes son, I want to kill you/Mother, yes son, I want to…WHOA-A-A!”; or how Roger Waters of Pink Floyd reduces his mother to just another overbearing “brick in the wall” on the ponderously self-serious “Mother“; or how Andy Summers of The Police wrote his own “Mother” as yet another cringe-laden piece of Oedipal-anxiety^[4]Goodness, it’s like no one got the memo that modern psychology has disproven virtually all of Freud for decades now! for their final album Synchronicity, single-handedly justifying why Sting^[5]who had his own well-deserved reputation for arrogant narcissism at that point had taken over all other song-writing duties by then.

Lennon, by contrast, opened his very first post-Beatles solo album with a “Mother” that expresses simply, without affectation, without philosophy, that he misses his Mum, and is sad that she died. She was the supportive young working class single mother who attended all his shows as a teenager, but was killed in a car-accident before he broke it big. Like Prince Hamlet of old, Lennon’s dickish behavior is perhaps explained (if still not excused) by the simple fact that he was grieving a beloved parent, and no one else was. He had already obliquely memorialized her on the White Album’s “Julia” and the Beatles’ landmark “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but now he finally addressed her directly. Although the circumstances of my own upbringing and mother’s passing differ vastly from Lennon’s^[6]e.g. I was raised middle-class, stable two-parent household, Mom taken by cancer not auto accident, obviously not a Rock Star myself, etc., his reaction still maps cleanly onto how I felt when my Mom died^[7]As you may now be getting tired of me bringing up in a book I keep plugging: I loved her when she was alive, and was sad when she died.

In an ideal world, this would be our relationship with all our mothers. Shoot, in an ideal heaven, that would be our relationship with our Heavenly Mother. But we do not yet live in an ideal world—and as is so important to acknowledge on this Mother’s Day, too many of us don’t have an ideal relationship with our mothers, either.

Such was the theme of Carrie and Lowell, the last great album by Indie-darling Sufjan Stevens, released in 2015 only 3 years after his own mom’s death in 2012. The titular Carrie, his mother, spent a lifetime suffering from major depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse, and abandoned him when he was only a year old. He enjoyed only an intermittent relationship with her over the decades, depending on how her own mental health ebbed and flowed.

(Carrie’s mental health problems are sadly apropos on Mother’s Day: remember how the founder of Mother’s Day, Anna Jarvis, passionately opposed its commercialization, and eventually went insane amidst her campaign to have the holiday repealed. In perhaps the cruelest twist of irony, her medical bills were paid for by representatives of the floral and gift-card industry.)

Much like Lennon (and unlike the many hyper-confessional artists who came in vogue throughout the ’90s and 2000s)^[8]Including yours truly, obviously, Stevens consciously avoided the painful topic of his mother throughout the vast majority of his musical career. Music for him wasn’t catharsis, but escape from his personal pain.

Yet though, again, the personal details differ greatly, Stevens’ relationship with his mother maps neatly onto mine and John Lennon’s: he loved her when she was alive (which is why it hurt so abominably that she kept abandoning him), and was sad when she died. There is no Freudian baggage to unpack here. Although my relationship with my own mother wasn’t anywhere near as fraught as Stevens’, I can still resonate with it.

Especially because, unlike Lennon, Stevens mixes in religion quite openly and unapologetically–indeed, religion for him is also not a consolation but a confrontation. There is “No Shade In The Shadow of the Cross” he sings on the album’s lead-single; the crucifixion of Christ for Stevens’ is not a great moment of glory and praise, but a profoundly painful reminder of the inevitability of pain and suffering, from which even the Son of God wasn’t exempt, so how can we expect to be?^[9]Such was a theme he had already addressed in his popular 2005 track “Casimir Pulaski Day.”

We don’t use crosses or crucifixes in our faith^[10]As we keep noting perhaps a touch too insistently. We tell ourselves that we prefer to focus on the utter miracle of His resurrection, rather than voyeuristically wallow in the brutality of His death, which after all was a rather common way to die way back when. But then again, perhaps the very commonness of crucifixions in the Roman Empire is what keeps its hold on our modern imagination, as a fitting symbol for how our entire mortal probation is laden with pain as inescapable as it is exquisite. Even if the barbarity of Classical-era torture has long since been abolished, we will still all be tortured in our own ways, even if only by the loss of our mothers.

This of course is why the promise of the Resurrection is so paramount–the promise that all of our pain will have one day been made worth it. But that day is not here yet, such that even Mother’s Day is tinged with melancholy. One day our grief will end; but that does not mean we do not grieve in the meantime.