When We Witness Trauma

A few years ago, my friends and I watched a man drown in front of us. I held onto his wife who was a couple years older than me at the time and younger than I am now as she cried and screamed and begged me to let her go after him. 

Moments before this, sitting in shorts and a sports bra on a sunny rock, I looked at my friend and said, “I don’t know how life gets better than this.” It was a beautiful, perfect day. And then in an instant, everything changed. 

It was months before I could sleep through the night. It was months, years even before I could fathom getting into an open body of water. I stopped writing completely.

When I was giving my statement to the park ranger, she asked me if I had anyone (a professional) I could or would talk to about this. And I—not wanting to claim grief that I didn’t feel belonged to me—told her: “Oh no, sorry. Yeah we don’t know him. We were just there.” 

And she looked at me with wisdom of age and distance from shock and said, “Well, I still think you should talk to someone.” 

I helped the widow change into dry clothing, my clothing, and tried to share our cooler of snacks and drinks with the surviving friends. After we’d settled them into a hotel room that neighbored ours, I turned to my friend—the same friend I’d commented to about the beauty of the day—and the realization sunk in. 

That had really just happened.

When I see horrific news stories, domestic and international, and I read something like “shooting at school; 2 critically injured,” I think “Okay good. Only two. Only 2 people injured and it seems like they’re going to survive. Okay.” 

Because two critically injured is objectively better than two fatally injured.

But what that doesn’t take into account—and something I consider now when I read and see stories of abject horror, whether in an elementary school 10 miles away or a war zone thousands of miles away—is all the people whose lives are going to be irrevocably changed because of this. Because of what they bore witness to.

And a news story can’t capture that. 

They don’t capture the people whose lives are shattered in the aftermath. Who won’t want to go out in crowds any more or who get panic attacks when they hear a loud noise. Who find they can’t sleep through the night without the aid of drugs or alcohol. Who push away the people that care about them because they can’t articulate what they’ve seen, experienced, survived. 

We are all casualties of societal trauma—a barrage of terror and violence and injustice. It is devastating to read headlines from Gaza and Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is sobering to know that the total loss is far greater than a fatality count… that there is a trauma that seeps in and lingers long after the bullets stop flying or the bombs stop dropping.

The human toll is always greater than we think it is, even for ourselves.

Surviving does not mean the struggle is over. The invisible cracks run deep.

So how do we counter it? How do we reckon with a world suffocated by suffering?

A few days after the incident, the park ranger called. I was still with my friends—as we were on the early days of a road trip together—and we had just pulled into a beach parking lot to watch the sunset. I hung back in the car as my friends headed to the water. The ranger was calling to share an update but also to see how we were doing. “Oh, we’re good. No, yes, thank you, of course. Yeah we’re totally good.”

A week or so later, the rental car returned and the flights to our respective cities purchased, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Suddenly the people I had been with, the ones I had experienced it with, were gone. I got queasy looking at the water I used to love running alongside. If I closed my eyes, I heard her wail. 

I texted my friends. We were all struggling. We promised, in that moment, to stay available to one another. To never worry about bringing up the pain and to trust that we could hold each other up together. We were forever linked now.

It is a small antidote. Like someone rubbing your back when you have the stomach flu. Oh, you’re still sick. No amount of gentle pats can solve that. But doesn’t it feel nice to have someone rubbing your back when you have the stomach flu? A gentle touch. An “I’m still here.” An “it’s going to be okay.” Maybe not immediately. Maybe never in the same way. But right now, in this moment, here I am. 

When we witness the unimaginable, our best defense is each other. Our most accessible remedy is the support and care of the people who love us. When trauma feels collective, our cure is community.