seeing

After I finished my graduate program and had my very first baby, Mike and I moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster. These events happened within a six week period. I was overwhelmed, underslept, and delighted to get to know my hometown in a new way, no longer from the vantage point of a child but with the transformed vision of a new parent.

I started working at what was then known as SouthEast Lancaster Health Services three months after Frances was born, which may have changed my relationship to this diminutive city even more than parenthood. I had many appointment slots every day, and my patients taught me a lot, perhaps most powerfully by offering me a window into the intimate quotidian struggles that come with being poor. They taught me about the barriers to health and mental health care in my town that, even with the aid of my new-social-worker-oblivious-white-lady-can-do energy, were often insurmontable.

That job invited me to sit down with people I had never seen before. These were people I had willfully looked past on street corners, sitting in wheelchairs, walking in pairs carrying plastic bags, hanging on stoops, talking strangely to themselves, wearing their age and chronic illness and poverty in such a way that others gave them a wide, silent berth on city sidewalks. They were part of my city too.

I remember telling Mike a few weeks into that job that I can't not see them anymore. I couldn't not know their stories. I couldn't return to the comfort of my privileged ignorance; the door had been opened and now I couldn't shut it even if I'd wanted to. I saw the poor all around me, and I understood that my looking away had been a form of complicity. It hurt.

What did I do with that new awareness? What am I doing? Getting through the day, mostly. Needless to say I didn't fix our busted health care or organize a new system of accessible mental health treatment. I'm not working tirelessly in service of the underrepresented and underserved.

I remember having a conversation then with a community leader who was visiting our clinic. She sat down across from me and said, without losing eye contact for a moment, that it was time I started serving on a board. Volunteering with more intention and purpose. My town needed people to step up, and I should respond to that need. But, I said, flustered, I have a baby! She's still nursing. And I work full-time. And I'm just figuring all of this out. How could I add anything else?

I think back to that conversation and smile at 29-year-old me. The parent kid ratio in my house then was 2:1. My back didn't hurt in weird places. My hair wasn't gray. I had so. much. energy. Now I'm still working full time, but the ratio is 1:3. My husband is dead, grief freights my every limb, I'm quicker to cry than ever before. How can I add anything else?

The past months have been an exercise in the scales falling away from all our eyes over and over. People in our communities have been hurt deeply; hurt and sometimes killed. We cannot not see it anymore. The #metoo movement ripped a scale away to reveal the brutal ubiquity of misogyny and sexual assault; now the incessant brutality of white supremacy is being revealed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And the pandemic is exposing injustice in every corner my privileged eyes chose to glide past and thereby condone.

It hurts.

In March and April, isolated and scared and struggling with work and school and a house full of difficult feelings, I found myself sliding back into the sense of alienation and disconnect I felt in the earlier days of my widowhood. I missed Mike acutely. I cried often; the loneliness weighed so much more than usual. I couldn't bear to see or talk with anyone outside my safest people. I wanted to withdraw.

Now my job is on summer break, and school is over, and the weather is perfect. I can breathe again. My loneliness has not subsided, but my resiliency is returning. I am looking around at this beautiful broken world, which somehow mirrors my beautiful broken heart, and recognizing that my own hurts do not mean I am in a worse position to be present to my community. Maybe my suffering has marked me in ways that will help me to serve it; maybe better than I ever could have at twenty-nine.

For now I'm reading, and watching, and listening, and mourning. I'm reluctant to speak in a time when so many seem compelled to speak because I'm still confronting the deep grief and pain the Black Lives Matter movement has invited me to truly see and take responsibility for. I'm feeling a lot of feelings, and waiting. I want my words and actions, whatever they may be, to come from my own pain and love and desire for healing, rather than reactivity. I'm trusting God to help me know how and when to respond to that woman's urgent invitation in my clinic office fourteen years ago, with whatever cracked and bruised gifts I have to share. She really saw me then; I'm grateful to her still.