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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 13, 2001

DALLAS -- The afternoon is sketched in charcoals and grays. It is cold, colorless, barren. Outside and in.

The narrow road ahead, barely a single lane, is framed by leafless, lifeless trees, their naked limbs jutting harshly in a hundred directions. The cold has left the grass more brown than green. The wind scatters fallen elm leaves across the broken headstones, breaking the stillness. As the automobile inches forward in the bleakness, I feel as if I am driving into a black-and-white photograph.

Some days are created to match the mood of your soul. This is one of them. The bleak afternoon and the stark, lonely landscape reflect the emotions tumbling inside me. My wife keeps looking at me, touching my arm, asking if I am okay. I try to answer. I am not sure if the words come out.

I am nervous, not sure what I will find or what I will feel. My mouth is dry and my palms are wet and something is crawling around my stomach. The day has a dreamlike fabric. I feel the unease of someone who has stayed away too long, and I anticipate a scolding for it.

Such emotions are silly, I know. No one among the tombstones is going to admonish me, and no one is going to greet me. I am standing inside the gates of the Calvary Hill Cemetery, sorting out the guilt and the remorse and the emptiness of more than four decades.

I am here to visit my mother.

I am here because of a song.

Evelyn Shelton, shown at age 26 in the 1946 passport photo she had taken to join her husband in the United States. She quickly fell in love with the quickened pace of her new country.

She died when I was young. More importantly, she died when she was young.

For most of my life, I have been a motherless child. That is how I thought of myself, as the lost little boy without a mom. It's how I imagined others thought of me. My sorrow could not have been described as well hidden.

Self-indulgence allowed me to believe that my sadness was the most important part of her passing. Still, it is true that my mother's death scarred and shaped my older sister and me. There has not been a day when we have not thought of her, or missed her, or wondered how her survival might have shaped us differently. Perhaps, had she lived, I would have been kinder, more compassionate. Perhaps I would have been a better person, a better partner, a better parent.

Only in recent years have I been able to look at this as her story, not mine. Only now, when she has been dead longer than she lived, when I am older than she was when I lost her, when I have a child the age I was when she died, have I been able to see the death of Evelyn Joan Shelton through a different viewfinder.

She was 36, a mother with two small children, and she was dying. She was a thousand miles from the rest of her family in England, and she was dying. She liked to sing and laugh and tell jokes, and she was dying. She was witty and fun and alive, and she was dying. She was Evelyn, Evie, Mom, and she had given up her homeland to follow her husband to America, and she was dying.

It is difficult to imagine the heartache of her final few days, spent over Christmas of 1956. She had purchased her daughter a sewing machine and a doll, her son a guitar and a Roy Rogers set. She gave them knowing this could be her last Christmas. She looked into the faces of her children knowing she would not see them grow up.

She had liver cancer. Years later, her youngest sister would tell me how my mother had worked in an English munitions factory during World War II, and how radiation poisoning was suspected. (Another sister, Rose, also worked there and also died of cancer.) As a 5-year-old boy, all I could comprehend was a casket in the front of a small church. I knew enough to cry, and nothing else mattered.

Gary Shelton's parents and sister, after the war in their Dallas home: Bill, Patricia and Evelyn.

I can picture her still, smiling, laughing, talking. I have clung to memories of her in the smallest of moments as if they were heirlooms. I have talked for hours with my Aunt Peg, coaxing anecdotes of my mother as a girl, as a teenager, as a young woman, trying to add color and dimension to faded photographs and old family stories. I have visited the places she played as a girl. I have been told she was funny, stubborn, witty, obstinate, vibrant.

I have heard about the American air base where she met my father and fell in love with him deeply enough to leave her homeland. I have come to recognize she was the best part of my father, and of my sister, and of me.

But before this, I had not visited her grave site since I was a boy. A few months after her death, my father packed a car and moved away from Dallas and his own memories. Whatever I had of my mother, I believed I took with me.

Sometimes, however, it doesn't matter how old the little boy becomes.

Sometimes, he still is called home.

If you are looking for the precise moment I got the idea to visit my mother's grave, you can begin in a smoky bar half a world away.

It was 1998, during the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. A bar called Police 90 catered to American journalists who came to drink beer, swap complaints about the road and, sometimes, test the karaoke machine.

Late one night, as the Games were winding down, we were sitting in a corner of the cramped bar when my friend Tim Sullivan, the fine columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, decided he was going to share his voice with the world.

"I'm going up on stage," Tim said. "I'm going to sing Danny Boy."

No, I said. You can't.

One of my earliest memories of my mother was the knowledge of how dearly she loved the song Danny Boy. Like her, it is Irish. She had been born on Achill Island, off the coast of Ireland. To the Irish, Danny Boy is not just a song, but a kind of national anthem. To me, it is more like a hymn.

I told all of this to Tim. I said if he sang the song, I would have to leave. He agreed to wait. Eventually, I left, and he sang, and the reviews said that he did so impressively. I promptly forgot about the night and assumed Tim did, too.

After that, two years passed. Two years. Tim was watching PBS one day when he saw a promo for a television show about the song Danny Boy. He taped the show and kindly sent it to me. It was one of those gestures that most of us think of doing, but few of us ever do.

It was an amazing tape, full of amazing performances, and you cannot imagine the power with which it hit me. If you do not know the song, it is a parent's farewell to a child leaving home for some faraway destination.

Often, you hear only the first two verses. But the third and the fourth are the most powerful, for they instruct the child on what to do if, upon returning home, the parent has died. It tells the child to find the grave site, to kneel and say a prayer, and the parent will somehow hear.

All the voices on the tape seemed to blend into my mother's voice. All of the lyrics seemed to be instructions. More seemed to be at work than coincidence.

I remember watching, remember my wife entering the room. I remember the lump in my throat rendering me speechless. All I could do was point at the screen. Janet sat down. By the end, there were tears in her eyes. Mine, too.

"Someday, I would like to go to Ireland," Janet finally said.

"I want to go to Dallas," I said.

She nodded simply, understanding. "Then we will go to Dallas," she said.

And so we are here, at the graveyard where my mother's remains are covered by soil, on a misty day in February. Tom Tobin, a great reporter and friend, had found the burial site and the address of the cemetery and given us a name to contact.

Calvary Hill is a lovely Catholic cemetery, the flat grounds well-kept and orderly. Scattered about are statues and artwork honoring various saints. When it was first built, I am told, the cemetery seemed far from the heart of Dallas. A Spanish-speaking neighborhood and Love Field have grown up around it, but it manages to keep the feel of a country meadow. And for all of my discomfort on arrival, I am pleased this is my mother's resting place.

Until I look at her grave, and the shame takes over.

It is a pauper's grave, unmarked and unrecognizable. It is merely a rectangle of dying turf between two other headstones, themselves dulled by time. No headstone signifies the way my mother lived or mourns the way she died. Seeing it, realizing my mother has lain there without recognition for so long, sickened me. I felt remorse for not realizing it, guilt for not remedying it, rage toward my father for allowing it. Yes, the medical bills must have been overwhelming for an auto mechanic. Still, couldn't he have done something? Couldn't I have done something?

The plot itself is in a nice location, with hedges in front of her and trees in back. A mockingbird sings from a nearby tree.

When my wife walks away to allow me solitude, I sink to my knees.

Gary Shelton visits his mother's grave in Calvary Hill Cemetery in Dallas, offering flowers and prayers and a song, Danny Boy.

None of us has any answers. We believe what we believe. And I believe this: I believe my mother knows I am here. As I talk to her about my life, about my family, about the way I find myself looking for her in my daughter's eyes, I believe she can hear. As I say my Hail Marys, and as I sing, softly and awfully, the song Danny Boy, I believe she is aware of it. When I tell her that, after all this time, I miss her still, I believe she feels the same.

Here, with the dampness of the wet ground seeping through the knees of my jeans, I understand why I was supposed to come. There is a comfort in being here, a connection. If you feel skeptical, I understand. I'm a professional at skepticism. But I will take something of this day with me.

My wife's hand is on my shoulder. She kneels and carefully spreads the flowers we have brought. We talk about love and loss, fears and family, and the things you lose and the things you keep forever. We talk about hugging our children more often.

Oh, and we talk about the headstone we will purchase for my mother. It will be charcoal and gray. It will have the year she was born and the year she died.

On it will be displayed the final two verses of Danny Boy:

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