Jan Nowell Barnes

August 17, 1959 — July 27, 2026

My mother died at her home in Milan on Monday, July 27, 2026. She was 66 years old.

Jan was born on August 17, 1959, to Gerald and Betty Harris of Milan. She married my father, Tommy Barnes, on June 17, 1985. Nine months later, on March 25, 1986, she had twin sons, Thomas Bryan and Patrick Ryan. She raised them just a few miles from the house she grew up in.

My mother spent her life taking care of people. She started in home health when my brother and I were small, spent most of her career at Regional Hospital, and finished at Jackson-Madison County General before she retired. The work never really ended, because it was never really work to her.

When her own mother became bedridden in 2023, she took care of her at home rather than see her placed in a nursing home. She kept at it long past the point where anyone would have said she had done enough, and not once did I hear her call it a burden.

She was the same way with animals. She could not turn one away, and at one point she had taken in as many as five strays. My brother left two horses behind, Elvis and Priscilla, and she fed and looked after them for the rest of their lives, as though she had promised him she would. My St. Bernard dog has no use for humanity at large, but he met my mother when he was a puppy and he never forgot it. He did not see her often, but he always knew exactly who she was, and he was gentle with her in a way he is with no one else. More than once I caught her at the kitchen counter slipping him fried chicken.

She would have told you that none of that mattered next to raising her twin boys. If you want to know who she was, start with a bench at the mall. She would sit on one for three hours at a stretch while my brother and I fed quarters into arcade games. She never rushed us. She got more out of watching us play than we ever got out of playing, and I do not think it once occurred to her that this was a sacrifice.

She was a great mother in the ways people expect and a fun one in the ways they do not. There was almost always a toy waiting in the back seat when she picked us up from school, and somehow it was the exact one we wanted, sometimes before we had even seen it in a store. I asked her once how she knew. She said, "I just know what's cool." She had us at church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. She drove us around to roll yards on Halloween, less a chaperone than an accomplice, and usually it was her idea to begin with. One night when we camped out in a neighbor's yard, she dressed up like a witch and came after us in the dark, and we ran around like it was a horror movie. And she would pick us up from the skating rink at closing time whether she had just come off a shift or had to be back at the hospital in six hours. We had the whole 1990s childhood, the one everybody is nostalgic for now, and she is the reason for it.

She took us to work with her too. I faked sick often enough to make a habit of it, because a day riding along with my mother beat a day at school every time. There was a house she visited just off the court square in Trenton, and next door to it was a little lunch counter where she would sit me down with a hamburger and as many bottles of Coke as I could drink. I would watch the jailbirds come in for lunch while she worked. She let us tag along like that our whole childhood.

None of it came easily, and we never knew. That was the point. She went without so that we would not have to, and she worked until she was dog tired to keep it that way, and she never let a minute of it show as anything but fun.

My mother was frightened of flying. The night before she flew to New York with my brother, she cried and made herself nearly sick over it. Then she got there and had the time of her life, and she talked about going back for years afterward.

When my brother graduated as a Doctor of Nursing Practice, nobody on this earth was prouder than she was. The two of them had been inseparable. They talked several times a day, every day, about things the rest of us were never told. I used to wonder what they could possibly find to say to each other every single day. I would give anything now to have heard any of it. He passed away in 2018, and losing him took something out of her that never came back.

Her faith carried her the rest of the way. She joined Double Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church and served as treasurer of the cemetery committee. She found her comfort in that church, in doing for other people, and in knowing that she would see her son again.

She came to see me in Memphis every chance she got. She loved seafood, and between the two of us I believe we ate at every place in this town worth eating at.She loved my wife, Lisa. The two of them had spent years quietly dreading one another before they ever met. My mother was afraid Lisa would not take to her, and Lisa was braced for a difficult mother-in-law. Neither of them had a thing in the world to worry about, though. They did not get to see each other often, but when they did they would send me off to run errands so the two of them could do whatever they wanted without me. In 2022 we finally got my mother to the beach. Lisa did not grow up around water, and my mother stayed out there with her hour after hour, happy as anything, which is exactly what she had done for my brother and me thirty years before.

She had no patience for large gatherings of any kind. She came to our wedding anyway, and she would not have missed it for anything.

Near the end I got one last moment with her, and it put a smile on her face for the first time in months. I reminded her that time does not work in heaven the way it works here. To her it had been eight years since she last saw my brother. To him it will feel as though he has only just gotten there, and he will look up and see his mother walking toward him. She waited eight years for that. She does not have to wait any longer.

She was preceded in death by her parents, Gerald and Betty Harris; her brothers, Jimmy and Joey Harris; and her son, Bryan Barnes. She is survived by her husband, Tommy Barnes; her son, Ryan Barnes, and his wife, Lisa Cheng, of Memphis; and her brother, Jack Harris.

Our family would like to thank Caris Healthcare, and especially the nurses and aides who helped care for my mother in her final weeks.

At her request there will be no service. She will be cremated and buried beside my brother.