A Collage Essay: Bearing Witness
1.
A long time ago I lived in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I was a child. It snowed a lot. After one particular bad storm my father and I walked down our country road; I wanted to take pictures of the glittery trees transformed by crystalized water. Tiny rainbows, melded, turned white. Narnia before the saving. I breathed out as I raised my disposable camera to treetops, fields, the still-flowing creek (I didn’t know then that nature’s beauty wouldn’t translate to film).
It started snowing again. As we walked, I tilted my head back to catch snowflakes on my tongue. Cold and slightly sweet. When we got to our neighbor’s farm we found that the heavy snow had crushed the roof. I shut my mouth. I raised my camera. I was struck by the awesome power of nature. But before I could press the shutter-release button my father reached out and pushed my hands down. “Don’t gawk at the suffering of others.” The sweet taste of snow faded and replaced with the acrimony of shame.
2.
I became a garden putzer this past summer. My child is a toddler and, through the spring and summer, he did what toddlers do—he toddled and explored and I toddled with him and I weeded. I checked on my herbs and berries and tomatoes. I plucked dead foliage and harvested what little actually ripened during this drought of a summer. I explained things to my child; I crouched and we examined sage, rosemary, tarragon leaves. I taught him how to rub herbs between his fingers so the scent would be released. His favorite was the chamomile.
My husband and I built the garden beds in May of 2020. We were going to be urban gardeners! We were going to learn how to survive if the pandemic never left, if we faced a total and complete societal breakdown! We’d have pretty flowers! We finished putting the plants and herbs in and had started working on the boulevard native plant garden when the news broke that a man had been brutally murdered by a police office not far from our house. Over the next few days we continued work under the battering sound of helicopters. Though over a mile away we could hear the chants—Say his name! George Floyd! The rage and sorrow turned into riots and Minneapolis was put under curfew. In the gloaming, under the watchful eye of droids circling the skies, we frantically tried to get our boulevard-flowers into the ground.
Since then, whenever I work in the garden, I feel the embodiment, the presence of my former self. I’m thrust back in time when I was working to cajole life out of the soil when a significant and brutal death had happened not far away. I think of George Floyd and those days of rioting and fire and fear and I think about my commitment to the work of social justice and equity.
3.
In August I was pregnant and in September I wasn’t. I miscarried and it was dramatic and it was quiet. It was an ER visit and hope. It was days of sitting still, trying to hold onto a pregnancy. And then, whoosh, gone. I was not prepared for how unbelievably painful it all was, how it would last for days, how, even at only 8 weeks, I would have actual contractions, how I didn’t know what else to do so I just sat in my recliner and downed ibuprofen and Tylenol chocolate and kept working on my classes through the whole experience.
(A note here: Capitalism is weird and it 100% has a firm hold on me. When my city was literally burning from the George Floyd riots, I was in my office setting up my summer classes. I could see smoke from my office and yet I still kept working. When my father was in the hospital last fall and we were unsure if he would make it, I brought my laptop and worked while sitting next to him. And, last month, for two weeks, I showed up to my computer, I lesson planned, I graded, I answered messages.)
4.
I grew up with a mother who was deeply evangelical and this is how I came to know the phrase bearing witness. As a child, a teenager, the context was in “witnessing”—telling others about god and Christ and salvation from hell.
But now, as an adult, the phrase means something else to me—it means I see what is happening, what has happened. I see you, I see the suffering, I am someone who is outside of what is happening so that I can offer quiet support and I can confirm and relate back to you that yes, this really happened, you weren’t crazy and I am here with soup and chocolate cake and a good book. Bearing witness is a part of our societal rituals—weddings, funerals, baby showers, birthday parties. Marching in protests. I see you. I’m one of your persons. I’m a thread in the fabric of your life, a life that I cherish.
5.
For many reasons, I’ve isolated myself from the news. I’m not proud of it but after a baby born during Omicron and the brutal attacks that began on Ukraine, it became a matter of mental survival. My brain and hormones were going haywire. I hated everything. I descended quickly into a fog of PPD that transformed into family-fear as my parents got sicker and sicker. I started plotting elaborate escape plans for my little trio—how we would survive down in the woods down at Minnehaha Creek. I witnessed what was happening in the world and instead of holding grief for others I was turning it back onto myself, how would this affect me? What would I do? I was not in an empathetic, action-oriented mental space. I, also, was just trying to survive and trying to keep a newborn and fragile parents alive.
But I’m returning to paying attention, to bearing witness of the atrocities and tragedies. I know that it isn’t just keeping myself/my child alive but it’s also teaching and working towards the dream of peace and safety for all. That takes paying attention, learning, voting, writing, and treating others with kindness and empathy in our own little worlds.
The only way we know the full impact of these terrible things is through images. To sit with them and not scroll. To not gawk but to witness and to mediate and to sit, really sit, with the why? Then, to do what we can in our own little worlds.
6.
Yesterday we stopped by my father’s studio apartment to drop off some food and we stayed to chat for a few minutes. He had CNN on and told us he just flips back and forth between CNN and Fox News everyday. “We’re on the brink of all-out war in the Middle East.” And, “It’s wild. A different narrative for every news channel.”
He then told me he’s been listening to Taylor Swift and he asked me my thoughts on her. “Why is she such a phenomenon? I read on her Wiki page that she started singing and playing guitar at a young age.”
My heart squeezed. It’s the thing I love most about my dad—he’s deeply curious and tries to understand the world—cultural moments, ideas, philosophies, religion. He’s good at asking questions as a way to converse and he’s good at asking in a way that reserves judgement. I still have complicated feelings about everything that happened over the past several years, but I’m trying.
7.
It’s been 6 weeks since I miscarried and my body is having a difficult time letting go of the HCG hormone. I go to my doctor’s office every two weeks to have the levels checked and when I drive home, I drive down Chicago Avenue.
I feel that I should take a different route home out of deference and respect—I don’t want to be a gawker—but I think of a comment someone left on a mutual friend’s Facebook post. I’m paraphrasing and I wish I could give credit but, in reference to what should be done with the intersection of 38th and Chicago, she said, “There should be a roundabout and white people should get stuck in it until they’ve faced their internalized white supremacy and are going to do something about it.”
There are 20 foot high Black Power Fist sculptures with flowers and pictures that act as roundabouts. In George Floyd’s Square, there is a green house, multiple memorials. On this day I am listening to the news about Gaza and Israel. I am remembering the radical push for change in the wake of George Floyd’s death and now living in the inevitable, well, what feels like forgetfulness. There is no cramping in my belly, just my heart. I am driving around the roundabout with the personal and the political. No. The personal and the personal and the personal which inevitably leads to the political.
8.
I started this draft a week ago. It’s now late October; today a gun man shot and killed 18 people in Maine. Our sugar maple blazed out in red and orange and now, after a day of hard rain, half its leaves are on the ground. It’s time to put the garden to bed. I will trim the tarragon and the raspberry canes. I will gather the sage, the rosemary, the lavender. I will put them in my mouth. There’s an inclination in me to leave behind what nourishes, what brings nourishment but I will not be afraid; I will swallow it all whole.