Witnessing death

I've said her name once (wrote it, actually) and I don't want to say it again. I didn't know her, or her family, or what she stood for or who she loved or what she was thinking when she died.

But I did watch the death of an Iranian woman on a video on the internet. And I cried. And I can't look at her picture any more. And I can't help feeling that people using her name (referring to her by first name only) are talking about her as though she is an idea or a brand.

She was a woman that we don't know. And her death is being co-opted by the world. And her family is being prevented from mourning by their government.

Does that mean we should not watch?

I've been thinking about that a lot. I feel like something sacred has been defiled in her death popping up all over the internet: blogs, news feeds, editorials. The most dramatic images posted brazenly.

I think sometimes we need to see. Sometimes we forget what death - murder - is. We forget that it isn't corn syrup. It isn't scripted. By leaving their homes, some people stare down death every day. And that is what it looks like. And it is horrible.

I watched the events of September 11 happen in real time on television. I remember what I was doing and how I felt and who I was with. But the images I saw on TV were not the whole truth.

Some years later, when I saw a documentary on the history of New York, a segment at the end showed things we did not see on TV that happened on that day. I watched people jumping out of the top of an impossibly tall building. That is part of the truth of that day that I had been spared.

We cannot say we bear witness unless we are truly willing to see. We cannot say we understand the cost of war if we are not willing to look at the dead or the wounded or the maimed.

And, if we see, we are witnessing something sacred. We must treat it as such. I don't like to post images of my most sacred moments, or call it by its first name.