What Does It Mean to Have a Witness to Your Life?
Strange question, I know, but it surfaced at my mother-in-law's funeral this past Monday in Raleigh, and I haven't been able to shake it.
A childhood friend of my wife's pulled her aside. "I'm sorry," she said. "Your mother was a witness to your life. Losing her is hard."
I had never heard that expression before, and the weight of it hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
If we're lucky, we have two witnesses to our life — our parents. They see everything. More than our spouse, more than our closest friends, more, even, than our siblings. A witness to your life doesn't just observe, they hold it all. Every dream you floated and forgot. Every version of you that didn't survive into adulthood. Every embarrassing, earnest, unguarded moment. They're a repository of who you were before you decided who you wanted to be. And then, one day, they're gone — and they take all of that with them.
Maybe that's where much of the grief comes from. Not just the loss of a person, but the loss of a record. A living memory that held you before you knew yourself.
Most of us spend considerable energy managing how we're perceived. We curate ourselves — what we say, what we wear, what we let slip about our lives. We've been doing it since middle school and most of us never really stop. But the witnesses to our lives are immune to all of it. They knew us before the performance began. They can see behind the façade, recognize the architecture underneath, and — if they're good ones — they cherish what they find there. They're the ones who say I knew you when. There are so few of them. And being with them feels like taking off armor you forgot you were wearing.
I am the witness to my children's lives. I knew them before they knew themselves. And I believe a good witness guides without directing. Observes without interfering. Because here's the hard truth about helicopter parents, snowplow parents, drone parents — the ones who manage every moment of their children's lives: they're not witnesses. They're directors. And I've been that, more than once. I've crossed the line from watching to controlling. The difference matters. When controlling parents die, their children don't always grieve. They exhale. A burden has lifted. That's a devastating legacy to leave.
A witness to your life can't be hired or requested or manufactured. It accumulates. Quietly, over decades, mostly in the background — someone taking note, savoring what they see, asking nothing in return. You rarely think about what they mean to you while they're there.
You only understand it fully when they're gone.
I'm Cam Marston, and that's Keepin' It Real.
