On Bearing Witness

About a month ago, I sat down to write a birthday letter to a girl I have been friends with for eight years. It’s not an unprecedented amount of time by any means, but eight years is still nearly half the length of my life. As I struggled to force the gravity of that feeling into words on a page, I found myself unable to stop thinking about a scene from the 2004 film “Shall We Dance?”

Besides starring one of the greatest gifts of 21st century cinema — otherwise known as Stanley Tucci — “Shall We Dance?” follows a couple struggling to resolve a conflict caused by secrecy after 20 years of an otherwise happy marriage. About halfway through the movie, the protagonist is asked why she thinks people choose to marry.

“We marry because we need a witness to our lives,” the protagonist, Beverly Clark, answers. “There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. All of it, all of the time, every day.”

There is a hopeless romantic in me who dreams of the kind of marriage Beverly describes, but the rest of me doesn’t believe that our lives’ only witnesses are found at the wedding altar. The family and friends that have been with me forever (or close enough to it, anyways) already witness everything. Nothing is kept completely secret — my most embarrassing mistakes, my ugliest reactions to heartbreak, my proudest victories. And when faced with uncomfortable displays of grief or jealousy-inducing accomplishments, bearing witness is the bravest act of love.

The meaning of bearing witness first took shape when I was eight years old. It was the first and last time I ever saw my father cry. Two hours earlier, we got a call from Toronto — his mother’s yearslong battle with a tumor in her brain was over, and the tumor had won. My father put down the phone and told us what happened, but I didn’t understand. Death as a word was an unformed concept to me. What felt real was the wholly unrecognizable sight of his wet eyes and crumpled face.

Until that moment, life had been uncomplicated. My parents were flawless. Sure, we disagreed sometimes. I found their punishments unfair. But Mom always had a band-aid if I fell, and Dad always had an answer if I didn’t know how to do my math homework.

When I first saw my father’s tears, I wanted to hide. The image felt inherently wrong, and my chest seized just looking at him. I quietly retreated to my own room.

Moments later, my mother followed, her face flushed cherry-red.

“Your father is grieving!” she demanded. “Go be there for him.”

In retrospect, it seemed absurdly selfish of me. My father had lost a parent, and I couldn’t handle a couple tears? But I was eight in a world where my male classmates shunned paper cuts for fear of appearing emasculated. I had never even seen an adult man cry before, and the moment was terrifying. Hearing someone tell me in words my grandmother was dead meant little. The sight of my father’s tears turned the world on its head.

“Being there” for my father, as my mother demanded, turned out to mean bearing witness to his pain when I simply didn’t want to. It meant confronting ugly truths about the nature of grief through the months of angry outbursts and despondent paralyzation that followed.

When someone I love is in pain — and I doubt I am alone in this — my instinct is to immediately become a problem-solver. I don’t want to witness grief or heartbreak, I want to make it go away. I want to write out a 12-step self-help plan and watch each bullet point get checked off.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that love meant not alleviating my father’s grief, but watching it. When he turned melancholic, or short-tempered, or unresponsive, love meant sitting through my own discomfort and fear and holding his hand through it all.

I adore the people in my very bloated camera roll, but my most profound moments of love have never been caught on film. I keep every handwritten card and special trinket I receive in a shoebox next to my bed, but those too are only echoes of the real thing. The hardest — and most rewarding — moments of love in my life have always come from bearing witness to grief and heartbreak and victory and unexpected death. Each time, I tuck the story carefully away in my heart, knowing that is the only proof of the moment I’ll ever get. Knowing that it is the only proof that matters.

Suddenly, in remembering that scene from “Shall We Dance?”, I found the words for my friend’s letter.

There’s a quote in this movie I like that goes, “Marriage is about bearing witness to your partner.” Because without someone to bear witness, we have no proof that we were ever here. We have no proof that our lives, out of the billions of others that have taken place on this planet, ever mattered.

Well, I’m not married, and I don’t plan to be anytime soon. But I find it hard to believe that the past eight years of my life — in which I have graduated high school, moved away from home, started college, and by all objective measures experienced some of the most important and transformative moments of my life — are any less worthy of bearing witness to than whatever is to come in my future.

No spouse has witnessed me grow from child to adult, but you have. You’ve given me the greatest possible gift I could ever ask for in a friend: someone who has agreed to grow old with me, to witness my life in totality, and to cherish each moment we share along the way.

You see every job rejection, every breakup, and every abandoned dream. You stay anyway. You’ve watched me scramble from the lowest points of my life to where I am now, and I promise to continue standing by you too. Watching as your witness is the greatest honor I can ask.

And happy birthday again!