When the Casseroles Stop Coming
Kathryn Johnson
Word Count 647
The house got quieter after my mother died, but I didn’t.
No machines were humming in the background, and there was no dramatic final-day oxygen concentrator or rhythmic hospital beep. But there were soft, insistent alarms I used to set on my phone. One for Mom’s morning pills. One for her afternoon blood pressure medication. One for the eye drops she didn’t like but always took anyway. Those alarms haunted me after she passed. I heard them even when they weren’t going off—phantom echoes in a suddenly silent room.
I silenced them all eventually, but the noise stayed.
Not the kind you hear with your ears. The other kind. The type that lives in your nerves. The buzz of fibromyalgia pain that crackles up your spine sharpens your knees, drills down into your hips, and won’t let go. The kind of noise that sets up camp inside your body and calls itself home. The sound of grief isn’t always sobbing. Sometimes, it’s static. Sometimes, it’s the high-pitched whine of memory.
Even now, when the house is still, my body hums like a storm’s coming.
Some people think grief is quiet. Once the casseroles stop showing up and the sympathy cards get recycled, you should slip back into some calm. But they don’t understand the noise of absence.
Grief is the missing voice in the other room, the missing shuffle of slippers on the floor, the cough that used to call for help. The quiet becomes a kind of scream that only you can hear.
It was loudest at night. Not because of anything external but because that’s when everything keeping it together stopped. When no one was watching when the house didn’t need me to be brave, I’d lie in bed and try to will my spine into stillness, but the ache would crackle, and the questions would start. Could I have done more? Should I have seen it coming? Why did they send her home?
That’s the worst noise: the endless replay of what can’t be fixed.
And then, morning. Always morning. My body still hurts, but now the sounds are different. Familiar. My grandson—he hums while he draws. Sometimes, I catch him doing it in her chair, the one she spent the last four years of her life in. I gave it to him after she passed because he asked and because I couldn’t bear to see it empty anymore. I thought I was giving it to him, but really, he gave it back to me—made it safe again. Made it softer.
He opens the door for me every day without being asked. That sound—of the door hinge, of him saying, “I’ve got it”—is louder than anything I lost. Not in volume. In meaning.
The writing came back slowly. At first, I couldn’t string a sentence together without crying. Then, I couldn’t string one together at all. But something kept nudging me—softly, like the alarms used to. A whisper. Tell it. Write it down. Make sense of the static.
So I did.
I started writing again—not because I had answers, but because I needed somewhere to put the noise. The guilt. The pain. The silence that wasn’t silent at all. Writing gave me a container. A rhythm. A way to speak without needing my voice to carry past a room. It became my friend when others left. It listened without flinching.
Now, on the days when the fibromyalgia flares and I feel like I’m made of shattered glass, I still write. I write even if it’s messy. I write even if it hurts. Because the page doesn’t mind if my words come slowly, it waits. And when I can’t hear myself over the ache, it’s the one place where I still do.
Noise doesn’t always mean chaos. Sometimes, it means memory. Sometimes, it means survival. And sometimes, if I listen closely, it means hope.
Kathryn is a writer living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Her essays explore grief, caregiving, chronic illness, and the quiet rituals that help us endure. After six years as her mother’s caregiver, she turned to writing as both witness and survival. Her work has appeared in Brevity Blog, and she is currently completing a memoir-in-essays, Invisible, Until I’m Not. When not writing, she finds joy in raising her grandson, Michael, who often hums his way into her stories.