He’s Momma’s Little Boy Who Still Feels a Little Lost

She’s gone, but she didn’t leave.

She’s away, but she has never been closer.

Isn’t that what they say about mothers? They hold their children’s hands for a short while, but their hearts forever?

When Shirley Jackson Malone left this earth last August, taken by a heart attack at 66, her baby boy Karl wasn’t ready.

He still needed her. He still counted on her.

Even when he had grown to 6 feet 9, 259 pounds, hers was the shoulder upon which he rested his head. Hers was the face he saw in every triumph. Hers was the voice he heard through every pain.

She understood this. Don’t all mothers somehow understand this? Work never done, right?

So, when Shirley died Aug. 13, part of her remained back, sighing, clucking that tongue, holding that hand.

And today, on Mother’s Day at Staples Center, because it is her baby boy who still needs them, it is Karl who will be showered with the gifts.

She’ll skip through his mind during crunch time.

“I talk to her all the time, in game situations,” he says. “The answer I get is always, ‘Hard work’ and ‘effort.’ ”

She’ll be on his lips when he shoots those free throws, one of those secret names he mouths before each shot.

“Yeah, I’ve added her to my list,” he says.

She’ll be in his eyes when he looks into the Staples Center stands and sees Derek Fisher’s mother, Annette. The two women were friends, and Shirley would be sitting nearby.

“We planned Mother’s Day this year,” he says. “She was going to be out there.”

When the game ends, his mother will be in his voice, as he takes the blame if the Lakers lose and none of the credit if they win.

“You take more responsibility than anyone else. Why? That was what I was told,” he says. “Put the blame on you. Don’t put the blame on anybody else.”

Imagine that. A 40-year-old millionaire athlete, after what could be the last important game of his career, repeating something he was told by his mom.

Besides serving as one of the last inspirations for the desperate Lakers in their Game 3 against the San Antonio Spurs today, Karl Malone also serves as a reminder to all mothers.

We listen more than you think. We hear more than you can imagine. We will remember long after you go. Because you are never really gone.

Shirley, the single mother of nine children, wasn’t only Karl’s protector and teacher, she was his role model.

Raising her family in rural Louisiana, she was a working mom who was picking cotton the day after the birth of one of Karl’s older brothers, Eddie. She was one of the few women to work in the local sawmill. She was a fellow fisherman who loved pickup trucks.

When Karl would send her money, she would complain that she didn’t need it, until he would tell her, “You just go buy you some crickets or baits,” and then she understood.

She taught him to give out pats instead of asking for them. She taught him to make a point of brightening one person’s day, every day.

She raised the kind of man who, when once mistaken for a skycap in the Utah airport, quietly loaded the woman’s luggage into her car and didn’t ask for a tip.

She molded this former Laker enemy into the kind of man who has been the team’s beacon of dignity in a locker room dominated by dolts.

“I really thought when I lost my mom, nothing else mattered,” Malone says, later adding, “When something like this happens, somebody has to step up and say, ‘We can do this as a family. It’s going to be tough, but it’s going to be all right.’ ”

Malone has spent the last eight months struggling to be the one to take those steps.

Sometimes they have pulled him away from basketball, as he declined to return to the Olympic qualifying tournament shortly after her death last summer.

“My mom always told me that no matter how bad it gets, you can always get a positive out of it ... but I didn’t see any positive out of it,” he says.

Sometimes they have pulled him away from Los Angeles, as he returned to his Arkansas ranch this winter while rehabilitating a knee injury that cost him half the season.

He would walk to her favorite fishing spots. He would stick his hands in his back pockets. He would pack his cheeks with sunflower seeds and talk to her between spits.

“I was drawn there,” he says.

Finally, those steps took him to her rural gravesite for the first time, on Feb. 12, her birthday.

He brought her, among other things, a pink Beanie Baby elephant because she loved elephants. It was a collector’s item. It was in a glass case. He knew it probably would be stolen, but he wanted her to have it.

He didn’t tell anybody, not even his family. It was something he had to do alone.

A couple of weeks ago, his sister phoned him to report a strange sighting at the grave.

“She said, ‘I was there, and somebody put a pink elephant there,’ ” Malone recalls. “I said, ‘It’s still there!’ That right there made me feel awesome.”

Of course it was there. Is there anything more enduring than the silly gifts given a mother by her child?

Around that time, perhaps not coincidentally, Malone responded with his most inspirational game of the season in leading the Lakers to a playoff victory over the Houston Rockets. During that game, he tore his jersey, but refused to take it off.

Shirley taught him that too.

“Playing this season, of course a championship is what I’m playing for,” he says “But it’s also a void I think I’m filling.”

It is a void that occasionally has been masked, and sometimes been shrouded, but it has yet to disappear, and may never.

“A friend of mine says, once you visit your mom’s gravesite, when you leave there, you’re going to feel the weight of losing her leave your shoulders,” he says softly. “I ain’t felt that yet. I don’t want to feel that. This keeps me a little edgy.”

Edgy, and involved, listening for her wisdom, sharing some of his own.

“I tell young people now, don’t worry about disagreements you have with your parents,” he says. “When you go to reach for that telephone one day to call, and you can’t, all of that is going to come back to you.”

The interview drawing to a close, the directive clear, Laker fans sent off to hug their moms before putting on their jerseys, Malone shakes his head.

“Every single time I talked to my mother, I told her I loved her,” he says.

Somewhere out there, her hands probably full, her days surely busy, she’s forever a mom, and listening still.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. For more Plaschke columns, go to latimes.com/plaschke.