Bearing Witness to the Pain of Others

Extracting career lessons from my mom’s darkest hour.

Photo by the author

This piece is dedicated to anyone who has ever sat in an emergency room, literal or metaphorical, wondering how life could possibly continue from here. It does continue. And sometimes, in ways more beautiful than we could have designed ourselves.

Some moments in life redefine us and change everything we thought we knew. They force us to rebuild from the foundation up. For me, that moment came in the sterile, cold brightness of an emergency room, listening to my mom describe to a doctor, in careful, measured tones, how she had planned to end her life.

I sat nearby, close enough to reach out if needed, far enough to give her the space to explain. The fluorescent lights cast harsh shadows across her face, revealing contours of exhaustion I’d somehow missed for months. The thin privacy curtain did little to muffle the sounds of the busy ER.

Yet in that room, time seemed to stop as my mom’s words hung suspended in the antiseptic air, creating a terrible mosaic of intention and despair.

This wasn’t happening, except it was.

I’d never experienced this weight of witnessing.