A Holiday Thought About Bearing Witness

I saw a homeless man named Howard kill himself in July of 1994.  I was crossing the Chicago River by foot on the Clark Street bridge with my then-wife when he jumped ten feet into the river.  He thrashed around without really swimming.  She figured it out faster than me.  We argued for a second.  Then we agreed.  She ran to the nearest pedestrians, a ways off, to try to find a phone to call 911.  I ran to the foot of the bridge and raced down the concrete stairs to the plastic box holding the life preserver.  I threw it on the water.  He was already below the surface, bobbing up, then down.  His eyes were bugging.  He reached up toward the life preserver, several feet above him, then dropped out of sight in the dirty green water.  I was the last person he saw.  He drowned, out of sight.

The delay in calling 911?  My companion asked several people for a phone, but not the tourist who was filming the episode, because she assumed the tourist would have volunteered his phone.  Turns out, he had one, and filmed the suicide instead of dialing.  The Chicago Police confiscated his video when they showed up.  After dragging the river to find the suicide, the cops made me identify the body, as if there might be five homeless guys in the bottom of the Chicago River, and they needed my help to know they had the right one.  The Tribune ran a short story.  His name was Howard something; I've forgotten his last name.  I tried to find out more about him.  He was 47, had been living in a shelter.  Felt like I should contact someone who knew him, do something to signify his death.  The trail went cold, I couldn't figure out what to do, and I felt deeply empty.  But my impulse, which I have since recognized and named in my head, was to bear witness.

I used to give innocuous homeless people money, to distribute some assistance and reward non-threatening behavior at once.  On September 1, 1997, I got a big raise.  I was thrilled.  On the way home, at the bottom of the smelly stairs of the Grand stop on the Red Line, instead of handing the woman a dollar, as I often did, I gave her a twenty.  She figured it out when I was down the platform, and I heard her yell out happily.  That felt like witnessing.

I mess this stuff up.  Often.  When I was a new lawyer at my second firm, I thought a senior partner had a drug problem.  He worked in the middle of the night.  He was irresponsible, inaccessible, manic, frantic, walked out of meetings agitated, came back from the john red-faced, runny nosed, and strangely fulfilled.  I had never seen a cocaine habit, but figured that was it.  I didn't report my suspicion to anyone.  No one reported their suspicions to anyone.  In less than two years, after a failed stint in rehab and failed urine tests, his superb career and his marriage were gone.  All of us who did nothing know we did wrong.  It was his choices, but we stood by.

I have a relative who is a member of a hapless, ridiculed, and largely despised social group.  We don't get along.  Haven't spoken in five years.  A senior colleague of mine, ostensibly referencing a client who is a member of that same hapless, ridiculed, and largely despised social group, took the occasion to call out that group as a bunch of "twisted, pathetic freaks."  My sibling.  I am a very thickly armored person.  Very used to conflict and managing it.  I almost cried.  It was weird.  I went home early.

A few months later, a pro bono case came across my desk, for a person in this hapless, ridiculed, and largely despised social group.  A case about discrimination against them.  So I took it.  Bearing witness, and all.  Argued it yesterday in a federal court of appeals.  Several baby lawyers helped.  They didn't hear the tirade, but I explained it to one of them.  She gets it.  I think she's bearing witness.

On the way to that same argument, in LAX, saw a guy in a mohawk get up briskly when his group was called, dropping his iPod and headphones on the floor between the rows of seated travelers.  Everyone saw it drop.  He was boarding quickly.  I sprinted and caught him.  He was grateful.  I was pissed.  How many people just let him lose it?  Lots.  They pretended not to notice me sprinting to the guy.  Pretended not to notice me coming back.  They're good at pretending not to notice.  I'm not.  It's not going to bring back the suicide man.  It's not going to make right all the times I don't leap up.  I fail, and succeed, and I try.

But I feel like Samuel Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction, for having this idea, even for saying it out loud.  I'm trying.  I'm trying real hard to be a shepherd.  When we're lucky, when we're strong, when we're happy, when we're loved, that's the best time of all to bear witness, isn't it?  I feel those things, and the need to name the impulse, and the need to talk about it, especially now, around these holidays of leisure, and plenty.  Peace to you and yours.