In Sukhothai, Thailand, I woke to the sound of chanting. It was beautiful and haunting, drifting through the humid night air and continuing into the morning light. At the front desk, the manager apologized for the noise. “The woman next door lost someone she loved,” she explained. “It is our custom—people come to the house where death occurred and they sing, they chant, sometimes for a week or more.” She apologized. For grief. For the sound of a community holding someone in their pain. As if witnessing should happen silently, privately, so it doesn’t disturb anyone.
How often do we do this? Apologize for our tears. Hide our grief so others don’t have to feel uncomfortable. Make ourselves smaller in our pain. But in Thailand, I didn’t hear noise that needed apologizing for. I heard a community bearing witness. I heard grief being honored, acknowledged, held. Something in that house had changed everyone connected to it forever, and the neighborhood was saying: We see this. We feel this with you. You are not alone.
“When grief goes unwitnessed, we hold on.”
Recently, there was a shooting at a clinic in our community. For the patients and healthcare staff who were there, for the people in neighboring businesses who heard the shots and felt the fear, for those who had just left moments before, for the staff who work there but weren’t scheduled that day, for everyone connected to this… something happened. Something changed. When something like this occurs—when fear moves through your body, when safety shatters in an instant, when you realize how close you came—that change needs to be witnessed. Your heart is still beating faster. Your body still remembers. You were changed, and that change deserves to be seen, acknowledged and held.
Sometimes our tragedies make headlines. Sometimes they’re witnessed by thousands through news coverage, social media and public acknowledgment. Sometimes they don’t get witnessed in this way through the media. And that can feel like our grief is dismissed, not important. Somewhere along the way, we’ve handed over collective grief to the media—to news anchors and reporters who process, report and validate our traumas for us. When they don’t show up, it can feel like what happened to us didn’t really happen at all. Like, if it’s not newsworthy, it’s not witness-worthy. But Thailand showed me something different. Witnessing collective grief doesn’t require cameras or headlines. It requires community, neighbors, choosing to show up and say: This happened. We see it. We’re here.
While public acknowledgment can validate that something significant occurred, there are also other forms of witnessing—ones we’re in charge of. Often quieter, more intimate ways we can choose to let others into our grief.
After the shooting, a friend told me she wasn’t ready to talk about what happened. So we didn’t. Instead, we painted. We wrote joy poems together. We connected through joy and, in doing so, opened up new access points to our grief that we didn’t know existed. It was like happening upon a back road when the ski traffic is all backed up—a different route to the same destination.
I think about the morning my mother died. It was 5:30 am when her breathing began to slow. I grabbed my brothers and sisters, and we gathered around her bed. We sang her favorite song as she left this world and entered the next. We witnessed her passing. We witnessed each other’s grief through song, through tears, through hands holding onto one another. We knew that no matter how tightly we gripped each other’s hands, our mother’s hand was slipping away. But we were there—wide-eyed, tear-stained, holding onto what we understood: We were meant to be in this moment together.
Sometimes now, on long drives home, I hold my phone to my ear and pretend I’m calling my mom. By inviting in this one prop as my witness, I have deeper conversations, tears flow more freely, belly laughs come easier. I talk and talk and reconnect to her, witnessed by the memory of her voice, by the road stretching ahead, by my own willingness to feel.
When grief goes unwitnessed, we hold on. We don’t have a space to lay it down, to be held as we express our pain and suffering. Many of us stuff it inside and then watch as it takes on a life of its own—through numbness, through angry outbursts, through sinking deeper into a shell of who we once were.
Witnessing takes many forms. Sometimes it’s a week of chanting in Thailand. Sometimes it’s painting and poems when words won’t come. Sometimes it’s a song at a bedside. Sometimes it’s a pretend phone call on a lonely drive. And sometimes—like now, in these words—it’s naming what happened and saying: This mattered. You matter. What you experienced was real.
To everyone at the clinic that day—patients, staff, the humans in neighboring businesses who felt the fear ripple through their walls, and those who had just left—I see you. What you witnessed was real. Your fear was valid. You don’t have to minimize it or carry it alone or wait for permission to grieve. Your grief deserves to be witnessed. Something changed that day. And we’re here to hold that truth with you.
