We begin with Lenny Kravitz’s “Johnny Cash.”

The explanation behind the song is unexpected. Kravitz says the song is not really about Johnny Cash, and it’s not directly about his mother dying either. It is about a breakup. But the emotional centre comes from a very specific memory: the day his mother died, when he was at Rick Rubin’s house in Los Angeles, and Johnny Cash and June Carter were there.

Kravitz had gone back to Rubin’s to take a shower and get some food after visiting his mother in the hospital. During that short journey, his mother slipped away. When he arrived at the house, he got the phone call. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, in shock, when Johnny and June came down, asked him what had happened, and held him. They comforted him.

And later, when he needed comfort again, that was the image that came back: being held in the moment his mother died.

That’s where this episode starts — with the afterimage of maternal loss. Not the mother herself, but the wound left by her going, and the memory of being physically held through it. It shows us something important right away: songs about mothers are often also songs about what we need when they’re no longer there.

A mother can be a person. A relationship. A loss. A standard of comfort. A place in the self that, once opened, can be touched again by entirely different griefs.

So we begin at the bottom of the stairs, after the phone call, with the kind of comfort you remember because it arrived, unexpectedly, when the world had just changed.

This is Lenny Kravitz with a song that always makes me cry.

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Lenny Kravitz begins with the moment after loss: the shock of the phone call, the mother already gone, and the comfort of being held while the fact of it becomes real.

Madness’s “Mrs Hutchinson” takes us to the moment before loss — the moment when one thinks their mother is going to die.

Mike Barson explains that it was about his mum, who was ill in hospital. A doctor pulled him and his brother into a room and told them their mother wasn’t going to make it. Then the doctor went back to the mother herself and said, in effect, everything was going to be fine.

That contradiction is devastating. In one room, the sons are being prepared for death. In another, the mother is being reassured. And then the story turns again: the diagnosis was wrong. She had something else in the end. She recovered. The song was written later, once she had been given the green light.

What makes this so strong for the episode is that it catches a particular family atmosphere around illness and death. Barson says talking about death then was taboo. That one detail matters. The fear is there, but the language is not. The family is being pulled into a reality they are not quite allowed to discuss openly.

So after Kravitz’s actual loss, “Mrs Hutchinson” gives us the rehearsal of loss — the day you think you’re about to lose your mother and can’t quite say it in the open. It’s not a grand, dramatic version of motherhood. It’s a hospital corridor, a doctor’s room, a wrong prognosis, and the strange emotional whiplash of preparing yourself for the end, only to be told later that it’s not the end after all.

For Barson this was the first real indication that the person who seemed permanent is not permanent at all.

Here’s Madness and “Mrs Hutchinson”.

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“Mrs Hutchinson” shows a mother’s mortality arriving early, sharply, and almost wrongly — the fear of losing her before the family knows how to speak about it.

Travis’s “Coming Around” gives us a different view of mothers: not as fragile, but as quietly perceptive.

In a 2000 edition of Melody Maker, Fran Healy points to the line about standing in the middle of town — that moment when everything is busy and you suddenly decide you’re going, leaving, letting go of whatever you need to let go of. Then he turns to the mother connection. He says that, in the same way a song comes through you, you come through “them” — and mothers see things before “you” do.

That’s a lovely thought, but it’s not soft. It’s quite practical. The mother is not a fortune teller. She’s simply someone who has been paying attention longer than you have. She sees the shape of you before you fully recognise it yourself.

He talks about everything happening with the band, and how amazing it seems — but his mother isn’t amazed. She’s not surprised. Not because she predicted the details, but because she saw something. Whatever that something was, she saw it.

That gives us a very different kind of maternal presence from the hospital fear in “Mrs Hutchinson.” Here the mother isn’t the one being watched over. She’s the one who’s been watching all along.

And this is one of the quiet truths in this episode: mothers often know before the story’s become clear to anyone else. They may not know the route. They may not know the outcome. But they’ve already seen a direction, a capacity, a temperament, a need.

So the thread moves from fear of losing your mother to the strange steadiness of being known by her. Before the world has decided who you are, someone may already have noticed.

This is Travis and “Coming Around”.

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Travis gives us the mother who sees something before you do — the person who recognises a possibility in you before it becomes visible to the world.

Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wish” turns that recognition into action.

Springsteen told The Charlie Rose Show in 1998 that the song is about his mother. He wrote a lot about his father, but his mother was different: consistent, nurturing, easier to understand. There was faith involved, support, and what he calls a lot of giving love. He says he shied away from writing about that, perhaps because it’s easier in rock and roll to write about fathers than it is about mothers.

And then he gives the detail that grounds the whole song: standing in front of the music store with someone who’s going to do everything she can to give you what you need and desire that day. It was a sacrifice on her part. Sixty dollars of finance-company money.

That’s not an abstract tribute. It’s a very specific act of maternal support. A mother sees the thing that matters to her child and finds a way, even if the way makes her life more difficult.

This connects beautifully with “Coming Around.” In Travis, the mother sees something before it’s fully arrived. With Springsteen, the mother acts on that seeing. She doesn’t only believe in the child in some general way. She stands outside the music store and helps put the instrument, the tool, the possibility, into his hands.

That’s why sacrifice here is not only financial. It’s imaginative. She recognises the seriousness of a child’s desire before anyone can know what will come of it. She treats the wish as real.

And that’s a powerful form of mothering: not simply protecting a child from life, but helping them move toward it.

Join Bruce Springsteen in “The Wish”.

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“The Wish” gives us the mother as support made practical: love converted into money, time, effort, belief, and sacrifice.

U2’s “I Will Follow” gives us what happens when that mother-love is lost too early — or never fully experienced before the chance is gone.

Bono told Rolling Stone magazine in 1987 that he doesn’t remember that much about his mother. He’s forgotten what she looks like. She died when he was fourteen or fifteen, and he says he was not especially close to either of his parents. That makes the grief complicated. When she died, he felt resentment because he had never had the chance to feel the unconditional love a mother has for a child.

He describes “I Will Follow” as a little sketch about that unconditional love.

That’s what makes this song such an important turn in the episode. After Springsteen’s detailed memory of being supported, Bono gives us the opposite: not a detailed abundance, but a missing place. A love understood partly because it wasn’t fully received.

The phrase “unconditional love” can become a cliché, but here it’s painful because it’s not being claimed easily. It’s being approached through absence. He’s not saying, “I had this and lost it.” He’s saying, “I lost the chance to know it properly.”

So what mothers leave behind isn’t always simple comfort. Sometimes it’s an absence that keeps asking to be understood. The child follows, but the mother is no longer there in a way that can answer. And what remains is not only grief, but a lifelong awareness of the love that might have been more fully known.

That’s a different kind of inheritance. Some mothers leave objects, phrases, habits, confidence. Some leave wounds. Some leave an absence so strong that the child spends years trying to understand what should have been there.

Recorded live at Red Rocks in Colorado in 1983, this is U2 and “I Will Follow”.

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“I Will Follow” gives us maternal absence: the mother gone early, and with her the chance to feel that unconditional love clearly and completely.

David Gilmour’s “Faces Of Stone” brings us to a different kind of loss — not sudden absence, but gradual disappearance.

Gilmour says the song was prompted by a memory of walking in Ladbroke Gardens with his mother when she was suffering with dementia. They were under the trees, and she was saying how lovely it was. She was seeing pictures hanging there in the trees. That moment sparked the song.

He says the song is basically about his mother’s decline: the ending of one life and the beginning of another, because his daughter Romany was born nine months before his mother died. For a period, they were alive together. His mother came to the house and held Romany as a tiny baby, and he has a photograph of that.

That image is simple and powerful: the mother in decline holding the new child. One life closing, another just beginning.

This is a very different emotional situation from “I Will Follow.” Bono loses his mother early, before the relationship can be properly understood. Gilmour is an adult, walking beside his mother as she declines. She’s still there, but dementia changes what “there” means. The mother who once held the child now takes his arm in the park. The child becomes the witness.

And that’s another part of this episode. It’s not only about being cared for. It’s about eventually seeing the person who cared for you become vulnerable, changed, and mortal. It’s about realising that the mother was never just “mother.” She was also a person travelling through her own ending.

The photograph of her holding the baby matters because it refuses to make the story only about decline. Family time overlaps. The old and the new are briefly in the same room. The line continues, even as one part of it is fading.

My own mother recently died of dementia. I can picture her now saying how lovely the trees were in the park. David Gilmour turns tragedy into art with “Faces of Stone”.

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“Faces Of Stone” holds the mother at the edge of life: still present, changed by dementia, holding the next generation while her own life is fading away.

The Beatles’ “Let It Be” closes this episode with the mother who returns, not in life, but in dream and memory.

Paul McCartney explained to Q magazine that during a difficult, tense period in the late sixties, he dreamed of his mother, Mary, who had died when he was fourteen. He describes the dream as a gift: seeing someone again, almost physically, after years of absence. In the dream she was reassuring. The gist was: don’t worry too much; it will turn out OK.

He woke feeling strengthened by it, and that became the basis of “Let It Be.”

This is where the episode gathers itself. We started with Lenny Kravitz needing the kind of comfort he received after his mother died. We moved through the fear of losing a mother, the mother who sees before you do, the mother who sacrifices to support a child’s wish, the mother lost too early, and the mother gradually disappearing into dementia.

Now we end with the mother as an inner voice of reassurance.

McCartney is careful about the dream. He recognises that, in one sense, you’re not literally meeting the dead. You’re meeting yourself, or memory, or whatever that deep inner mechanism is. But the comfort is still real. The dream still provides strength.

And that may be one of the lasting things mothers can leave. Not perfect answers. Not protection from every difficulty. But a voice, or a way of being held, that can return when life becomes hard.

In that sense, “Let It Be” is not simply a song about being passive. It’s a song about being steadied. The mother doesn’t come back to remove the trouble. She comes back to help him stand inside it.

And that’s a fitting end to What Mothers Leave Behind: the idea that what mothers carry can become something we carry too.

I look forward to seeing my mum again one day. Paul McCartney made this wonderful song from his experience. This is for all who’ve lost their mother.

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