Good Grief
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
In Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People, Jane Goodall writes about her visit to a science lab that conducted experiments on chimpanzees. Seeing them hunched in their cages, she was overwhelmed with grief and began to weep. One of the chimps reached through the bars of their cage to wipe away her tears.
Bearing witness is a way to meet the moment. It is part of what we can and must do. And, as Jane Goodall reminds us, humans aren't the only ones with the capacity to recognize a holy moment and respond to its mandate.
Witnessing makes things sacred. It gifts us with images that take up residence in our lives. The most potent of them remain with us for years, like trusted friends; a sip of cool water when we're parched, a crust of bread to nibble when we hunger for meaning.
But how shall we bear witness to the losses occurring now, when we can barely imagine their scale and have yet to experience the full brunt of their absences? Canada's last intact ice shelf just broke off and slid into the sea. It was the size of Manhattan and then some. Since 1995, half of the Great Barrier Reef has died. It is - was, Earth's largest single living organism, visible from space.
I sometimes think about the expression, unrealized losses. In accounting, it's a technical term for assets that have declined in value but don't appear - are not realized - on the balance sheet or tax return until they are sold. For me, the words take on another meaning: we are churning in a tsunami of losses that are unrealized not only because we have failed to take them into account, but because they are incalculable. How shall we comprehend the trees felled, the species extinct, the Indigenous songs unsung, and all the lives cut short by violence and pollution?
Author and Harvard professor Rob Nixon writes of Slow Violence, as in pollution, chronic wars, failed policy. Slow violence is cumulative and long-lasting, but often hidden, like the dioxin from Agent Orange that, fifty years after the end of the Viet Nam war, is still causing birth defects and sickening humans and wildlife in Viet Nam as well as veterans from the U.S. Responding to an online article about dioxin on the website Beyond Pesticides, a man writes,
I am a Vietnam Veteran, 8 years into chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, as are so many of my fellow Veterans and Vietnamese of several generations as well, many without adequate care/treatment. Most civilians are unaware of dioxin from bleach, much less the quantities that are dumped in waterways by industry in their pursuit of supplying us with lily-white everything. I am reminded of a practice which I hope has self-extinguished: using lead to bleach flour {lead solder in dinnerware and gasoline is a whole other topic.] and in various cosmetics. Thank you for this article. People should never forget, but first they have to know.
Interestingly, the Latin word, testis, is the root of both 'witness' and 'testicle'. In the ancient world, it seems there was a practice of holding a person's testicles (one's own, or someone else's) while taking an oath, perhaps a way of reminding oneself that weighty decisions must consider future generations. It takes balls to bear witness.
Bearing witness is also a way to metabolize grief. It's something we can do, whether we're writing a comment or recording an injustice on our cell phone. It's a way to personalize the impersonal; to release our terror into the care of those willing to share it by seeing with us, through our eyes. It removes the stigma of admitting we are hurting and afraid. The political is personal, the personal becomes public.
Sometimes bearing witness takes the shape of looking away, eyes downcast in respectful silence, as with the first known photographs of enslaved people. The Zealy daguerreotypes were taken in 1850. They are not images of strangers: their descendants are alive today. Does looking at these photographs further degrade the people whose images were recorded without their consent, or does it honor them? It all depends on the reverence with which we gaze or look away.
In his book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde speaks of 'the labor of gratitude'. He is referring to a life of meticulous honoring of what we are given, that which makes us who we are. Bearing witness is part of the labor of gratitude of these times. Our companions are the stories we are living, and those that others have given us. A caged chimp who comforts a weeping human. Images of a forebear, standing tall, in chains. An aging soldier willing to speak of the war that lingers in his body. As with the influence of microbes, tiny acts of repair have a life of their own, and the capacity to shape things. Though we continue to torture them, other-than-humans insist on staying connected. People should never forget, but first they have to know.
