Withness isn’t a word we use very much, if at all. In fact, editing software seems torn about whether it’s an actual word. But it’s a word we need. Because we need to increase it’s existence in the world and name it when we find it.
I was just visiting with a family whose matriarch had died after a long struggle with cancer. When I asked how they were, their answer was that they were together, and because of that, they would be fine. That’s Withness.
If we don’t know Withness, we know the absence of it. We know isolation, abandonment, loneliness.
We started this project to tell stories about people who were with their people through the darkest days. These kinds of stories need to be told and heard. More than that, they need to be held up to a light and examined so that we can keep on multiplying them. Our hope is these conversations won’t just be about Withness, but they will be a model for how we talk about the shadows of life together.
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Origin Story
We make a case for Withness as a word and a reality. We talk through the origin story of this podcast and how Laura’s own family story made us hit Record on this project.
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Sarah
“I need my life to be a eulogy for him.” Sarah tells us the too-short story of her son Levi: how they laid him down and how they carry him still.
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Ben
In exchange for coupons to mini-golf, Ben tells us the story of losing his parents at a young age and we wonder with him just how joy belongs in painful stories.
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Furaha
Furaha woke up in the middle of the night to the knock no parent wants at their door. We talk about the big life of her son Evan and how her care for his friends led to a group selfie at his funeral.
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Jason
"I just wanted her to say something--i wanted her to be that cheerleader." What do you do when you lose the voice that's rooted for you your whole life? And what do you do when they're with you but not with you? Jason tells the story of grieving his mom while she was still living.
