An Ode to Those Trapped Under the Rubble

How can I describe this thing that happened to me? Was it a lucid dream? A vision? A trance of sorts? Whatever I can think to call it, I would not call it good. The aftermath may have brought benefits, but while it lasted, it was almost assuredly the worst thing I have ever experienced. Therein lies my good fortune. 

And I am neither a naif nor a novice when it comes to bad things. 

I’ll try to tell you about it because I think it has some bearing for many of us in this moment; it might be worth the sharing. But please, don’t read on if you haven’t the stomach for a tiny taste of the atrocity.

Here is what happened: one night, not too long ago, I was in that strange and sometimes eerie space between consciousness and sleep. I turned over in my rather comfy bed, and without any obvious provocation, I was abruptly transported. I seemed to feel and to be a Gazan woman, trapped beneath the rubble of the building where I had been sleeping just minutes earlier, bombed without warning.

My initial response—as Elizabeth– was that I should take a moment to sense it, feel into it a little more deeply. This is something I need to know, I thought. Something I ought to allow myself to experience. The intention was to give myself over to an identification with this trapped and injured woman, followed by a quick return to my primary focus at that time of night– to get myself securely to sleep.  

So, I went ahead and let myself explore the torment of being crushed under a building.  

Let that sink in.  

It was dark. Something was terribly wrong with my leg and the pain was excruciating. I was stuck in a very small space, a slab of concrete resting heavily across my abdomen, pinning me down. I couldn’t move anything below the waist and there was no way I could shift my upper body to alleviate the burning of sharp concrete shards pressing deeply into my side. My chest was tight, breathing was incredibly difficult, and blood was pounding furiously in my neck and head. Even with all that going on, the claustrophobia had to be the very worst of all. 

Okay. Wow. That is awful, I thought. The implications of just how awful edged toward the overwhelming. I’ve thought often enough about the people trapped under the wreckage of their homes and businesses in Gaza. Have you contemplated that particular and shockingly common depravity? If you have, then it is almost certain that like me, you’ve been horrified. I have wept, and I have also raged. Plenty of both. I take action too, but it has been easy enough for me to do that, perhaps because my perspective has been an external one. I have been able to circle the reality of what is being done daily to Palestinians gingerly, from a place of choice. I have known that when I feel unable to take another minute of the suffering, when I am at my absolute limit, I can watch Netflix. I can strike up a welcome conversation about MAGA and the final shredding of the American experiment with a fellow radical leftist Marxist Democrat. I have had the option to change the subject. In other words, I have been able to walk away.

And I have done that. 

Back in my bed, once I had experienced what seemed like a respectful measure of the horror that my government and tax dollars are visiting on innocent strangers, on blameless people, I thought to adjust my pillows, ready to move on to sleep. But I found that I was paralyzed. I could neither move my body nor could I return my consciousness to the safety and comfort of what I knew was my own completely intact bedroom. In this instance, I was not able to walk away.

My entrapment was psychic.  While I maintained a faint awareness of my American identity and location, the majority of my being was under that rubble. I found that I could neither turn elsewhere nor move on. I was stuck there for an hour. A mere hour. An hour that had all the nerve endings of an eternity.  

Once I realized I wasn’t getting out anytime soon, I was awash with fear. Will anyone find me, dig me out? Will I lie here for hours or maybe even days? Will I lose my leg if I live? The shock started to wear off, the physical pain skyrocketed and I began to think of my children. I had to contend with the utterly unthinkable: they too might be lying somewhere in the wreckage grievously wounded, alone and terrified, possibly dying, calling for me. Wondering why I had abandoned them when they needed me the most. 

My heart shattered.  

I sobbed–I was literally wailing and choking on my tears–but I had to stop myself from indulging in even that small comfort because crying made breathing even harder and more precarious than it already was. In whatever we call this thing, this trance, I was then faced with a choice: do I take the very minimal steps available to try to stay alive in the hope of eventual rescue? There weren’t many things I could do, but I could try not suffocate myself with my own snot and tears. I could determine to stay alive as long as possible. Or, I could choose to give up, accept the inevitable, go into the pain and simply do my best to pray until I passed out.  

Never in my life have I felt so bereft, so alone. Never have I experienced such utter helplessness. Never have I been so unrelentingly confronted with the fact that I and my life mattered not. At all.  

And then….to just lie there, entombed and yet alive, holding all this impossibility in the context of my imminent death, with a heart so broken for my poor, poor children that it started to lose its ability to beat properly. Every cell in my body screamed to escape. To get OUT and be free and be myself and live some sort of life, no matter how much suffering it might entail.   

Pinioned, my thoughts went to Pepe Mujica, the late President of Uruguay, who famously spent two years confined at the bottom of a well by the CIA-supported right-wing dictatorship he fought to overthrow. It gave me a moment’s courage, but the truth is that I was face to face with my own weakness, which quite unhelpfully reminded me that his captors knew where he was and brought him food every once in a while. I was missing. And in all likelihood, no one was ever going to find me. 

This, then, is how it ends for me. Without meaning or reason. Another random casualty of man’s stupidity and hatred. This is how I leave the world: excruciatingly alone, killed by other human beings who never knew me and yet wanted me to die. I have lost and lost and lost.  

And then without any action on my part, the dream lifted. I could move, I could breathe and yes, I could cry. Which I did for a good long time. It won’t surprise you that I didn’t sleep much at all that night. I must have drifted off just before dawn because I awoke soon after to the glorious cacophony of wild birdsong, pure life and pure life force.  

I am pretty sure that many–if not most–of the Gazans who have died at Israeli hands beneath the rubble did so with far more dignity, grit and integrity than I mustered in my strange little interlude. Being real here—they actually did it, and I experienced nothing but a visionary ‘trailer’ while snug in my bed. I fervently hope that some of them found meaning—which I am afraid I failed to do– despite the savagery they were made to endure. Surely the fact that their living compatriots show us each day how to find valor in the face of grave danger, beauty in the midst of destruction, and deep humanity in response to barbarism would incline me to believe that many were successful where I was not. 

I naturally continue to feel rage and grief at the endless and obscene killing—as well as the wide web of losses it weaves—but I also feel a new reverence for the ordeals endured, the courage mustered, the tears shed, and perhaps unshed, as lives have ebbed, martyred in the slowest and perhaps cruelest manner imaginable. This makes it a little harder for me to bear, but that is ok. I think I must. It isn’t much, really. 

The following day as I got up and walked out into my life, I was struck by the vibrance of colors, the sweetness and sharpness of sounds, the extraordinary softness of the breeze on my skin. I walked past fuchsia and pale-pink hibiscus big as salad plates and they seemed to me exactly what they are: things of wonder. A blue heron standing stock-still in the river fishing left me breathless in awe.  

I won’t belabor the point, because I am sure you get it. We all have our sorrow, our fear, our shame and our anger– and they are important. Life is a patchwork at its best. These feelings are not there simply as impediments to our happiness, to be banished or eradicated. There is a lot of (increasingly real) stuff that does drag us down or fire us up, demand our attention and our action, and yet in so doing, it can distract us from the beauty, wonder and joy that life offers us as well. 

Many of us are doing all we can to stop this insanity, but still, it continues. If I knew how to end it I would, and so would you. We will not give up, but in the meantime, I am thinking that to truly love and cherish the life I have been given, even with all its disappointments and inadequacies, is the very least I can do to honor all those who have had theirs so wantonly stolen, a small gesture of homage to those who can no longer watch the sun set widen over the sea or bring a fragrant cup of tea to their lips.  

I can’t tell anyone else how to live, but please consider…if you have good clean cold water to drink, wholesome fresh food to eat, a warm bed, then maybe stop and savor each sip, each bite, and take a moment to be glad every night when you lie down on that bed, ready to go to sleep, free from fear of the very real possibility that when you awaken, it will be under the rubble.     

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Elizabeth West.