At first the lyrics seem ambiguous, but when you start to think about them in terms of losing a pet they make a lot of sense. You hear a noise and you turn around expecting it to be the animal and are reminded again of its absence when you don't see it. Looking doesn't mean you're searching for the animal, it means you keep thinking you'll see it. By singing about herself in the third person, she prevents this song from becoming maudlin. She doesn't try to describe how sad or emotional she was made by the animal's death. What she details instead is what's it like to experience the hole left in our lives by the sudden absence of a familiar presence. Long after we think we're done with our mourning it still comes as a shock to realize whoever it is we're missing is never going to walk into the room again.
Darby doesn't try to elicit sympathy from us with her voice on this song with any forced trembling or other such silliness. She just gently talks about the circumstances. In fact by talking about her experiences in the third person, it's like she's offering sympathy to those who have experienced what the song describes. In doing this she's able to create a bridge with her audience based on real emotions. She's able to take a subject which could easily lend itself to sentimentality and turn into a universal statement on death, loss and the grieving process.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like to have a person in your family who tries to force their religious beliefs down everyone else's throat. In the her song "Heaven", Darby describes a family whose mother spends her time telling her children they and their father are going to Hell. "My mother worries we were not Baptized/My mother worries we can't be with her/My mother says it's written in the verse/We won't go to Heaven/We won't go to Heaven". As in the previously mentioned song, Darby describes what's going on without passing judgement or reacting emotionally to what the mother says.
It's as if she trusts us to form our own opinions.Try and imagine how'd you feel if your mother told you stuff like, "Your father's going to hell because he's Jewish", or if you don't accept Christ as your king you'll go to hell? She says lines like these and the ones quoted above with almost no inflection. The words stand out like bold type in dark black ink on a clean white sheet of paper. There's a starkness to them which makes you feel empty. What kind of person could say such cruel things to and about people they supposedly love? Maybe somebody who held to the same belief system as the person speaking those words would see it differently, but what kind of person would tell their children their other parent is going to hell?
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