“My gumboots are gone!”
“Bunny is gone!”
“My phone is gone!”
These are some of the panicked statements I hear at home almost every day.
“Well, if it’s not here, it will be elsewhere. Let’s have a look together”, I say.
And of course that’s true. When something is “gone”, that does not mean that it has truly disappeared: It means that we either do not immediately know where it is, or that we know where it is, but cannot easily reach it.
This morning, driving home from the school run, it suddenly dawned on me. We say:
“Peter is gone.”
And we mean he has died. Often, we understand that to mean that he no longer exists. We might know where the body is – but where is *Peter*? Where is he as a personality, as a presence, as a collection of experiences, as someone we had in our lives?
The simple answer is that we either do not immediately know, or that we know but cannot easily reach him. What it certainly does not mean is that Peter has disappeared.
What’s gone is elsewhere.