It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter how hard it is. It doesn’t matter how scared we are, how stressed we are, how many other responsibilities we have on our plate.
Our job? What they need from us? It is to be there. What they need is us.
In his beautiful and haunting new book Everything Is Tuberculosis (which we carry at The Painted Porch and have been raving about), John Green talks at length about a brave young boy named Henry who is battling the disease in a hospital in Sierra Leone. On top of the persistent infection, Henry is also dealing with the misperceptions of his illness, which is stigmatized in his community and scares even his own family members. Green quotes from a poem that Henry writes to his mother, who has given up everything to provide for and get medical care for her children,
“Mom you are special and beautiful You stand closer When everyone ran away Especially my cousin ran away But you stood firm.”
Green notes the shift in the tense of the poem, which far from being a grammatical mistake, is a profound statement about the role of a parent in a child’s life. “[Her] presence remains present,” he observes, “even as everyone else’s presence is past.”
That’s our job. To be present. No matter what. No matter what anyone else says or does. No matter how hard it is or how much we’re struggling with. They need us. To stand firm. To stand with them. To stand closer. We may not have all the answers. We may not always know the right words to say. But our presence—steady, loving, unwavering—is often the only thing that truly matters. In the end, it’s what they need from us the most.
P.S. We liked John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis so much that we asked the publisher to send a display for it in the Painted Porch bookstore, which we’ve never done before (see it here). It’s an important book that details how tuberculosis, our deadliest infection, is now primarily caused by man-made decisions—and provides solutions for how we can reverse the trend. Grab copies of Everything Is Tuberculosis here, then follow it up with John M. Barry’s excellent book The Great Influenza.
