Shannon Yarbrough

The nameless narrator in Grief says, “When you lose your parents, you’ve lost your audience.”  No one else will ever care about you the way they do.  I find that to be very true if you have a relationship with your parents.  You can go to work and tell your coworkers a story, and they may listen intently but in the back of their minds, someone is wishing you’d just shut up and go sit down and work already.  I’m guilty of being one of those people silently wishing.

You might come home from work eager to tell your husband or wife a story about what happened that day, and they may listen or interrupt you.  You may have to wait till the commercials to finish telling it.  You may lose your place and end up repeating yourself.  Or you may eventually think it’s not important and never finish telling them the end of it.  And no one will ask you what happened or how your day was or how that story ended. Because no one cares.

No one really really cares.

No one will ever care like your parents.

At 14, J lost his father.  He’s also grown up without a mother because she had him at a very early age and has never really been a part of his life. He was raised by his grandparents.  His aunts are his sisters.

His mother married and settled down in another state.  She had other children.  She has grandchildren.  She has only briefly reached out to J in the years we’ve been together.  She’d call sporadically, leaving that door open and expecting J to come through it.  It’s like a friend that never calls, but when they do call you can pick up right where you left off the last time.  Only there is no place for J and his mother to pick up from.  There never was a starting point to reference back to.  The gaps between mother and son are too wide to close. And they are both too stubborn to start over.

It’s been a year and a half since we last heard from his half brother or his Mom, Christmas 2007 in fact.  Then, his half brother called on J’s birthday last month to alert him that his mom is in the hospital with cancer.  J has not heard from his brother again since then, but he has spoken to his mother. He is torn.  It’s hard not to carry on with life just as it has been for so many years…without a mother figure in it.  It’s hard not to want to care about her well being and drive the four hours to see her.  But will it change anything?  Is it just too late to change anything?  Sometimes it is.  Because in the end…

No one cares.

It’s very hard for me to sympathize and know what he’s going through becaue I have always had a mother and father.  My life has not read the empty page that would be there without them.  If it were my mother, I know I would not think twice about getting in the car and going to be with her.  But I have talked to and seen my mother on a very regular basis ever since I left home. I have never known a day without her.

But J hasn’t.

He doesn’t know her has a mother.  Sure, she is his mother…flesh and blood.  But emotionally?  No.  So when it comes down to the heart of the matter, should he care about flesh and blood?  It is the one and only single thing connecting him to the woman in Indiana in the hospital bed.  Is it enough?  Sometimes we want it to be, but it just isn’t.  It isn’t enough to make us want to care when we have no emotional or spiritual connection to that person.  Our heart doesn’t know them. And over time, that pain has healed.  There’s a tough ugly scar there now.  There’s no breaking through.  Even when someone is about to leave this world.

And maybe sometimes we long for the comfort that will come from it.  She will no longer be in physical pain.  J will no longer be in emotional distress. We can’t change the past.  We can forget it.  And sometimes we don’t want to know the future, so we turn out back to the shadows in the room and wait for the sun to shine and carry those shadows away.  The fences are too high.  The walls between us are too hard to climb. We don’t give up.  We just can’t give anymore.  We haven’t stopped caring because remember what I said….

In the end, no one really cares at all.