Back in the plaza, at the heart of the protest that cold March day, a trio of drummers beat time at the center of the swell of people—three quick beats that marked a call. The crowd, in turn, chanted in response:
Beat—Beat—Beat
DON’T ATTACK IRAQ!
Beat—Beat—Beat
BRING OUR SOLDIERS HOME!
Even amid that mass, I was embarrassed by the sound of my chanting voice. The people around me shouted with such purity of rage, such absence of self-consciousness. But when I raised my voice to add it to theirs, something didn’t feel right, or I felt somehow like I was doing it wrong. Their shouts came from them with surety. My own sounded false and uncertain.
A black stage rose at the north end of the plaza. Its trimming rippled in the afternoon wind. An empty lectern waited at its center. On either side of it, facing outward, toward the crowd, stood a line of military mothers. Each one held an oversized picture of their dead son or daughter. As we’d entered the plaza, someone had thrust a sign into my hands, and now I looked down to really examine it: it showed a rainbow blazing over an image of, for some reason, Martin Luther King Jr.
Somewhere in the crowd were my mother and my father. When they’d returned from Birmingham in ’63, they’d started organizing in Chicago against police brutality, and for better housing for the poor. I picture them in that frigid winter of ’64, on folding chairs on hardwood floors, in the cold gathering halls of Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, people gathered round, talking, smoking, laughing, making plans, half of them with little children bouncing on their laps.
My parents were part of the wave of young leftists inspired by the Black-led organizations who were bringing the Civil Rights Movement to the north. The work my parents would do the rest of their lives started in those rooms in Uptown. There was just a single couch in the office in the back, and a motto on one of the walls that said, “No Rest Until We Win,” so the bargain became that anyone who wanted to sit down on the couch to rest had to play something on the guitar while they did; so—as my mother told it—as people worked, day or night, there was always music.
Searching that crowd for my parents, looking at the line of mothers up on stage, I was beginning to understand that they had earned what they stood for. They had fought and they had suffered. They had suffered because of their own losses, or because of injustices experienced firsthand, or injustices that they had witnessed.
I saw a movie once where a woman’s husband dies too young, and she’s left to raise the children on her own. In the middle of the night, her son is woken by a sound coming from somewhere in the house. He walks through the dark rooms, following that terrible sound, and through the gap in the bathroom door watches his mother pacing back and forth, clawing at her face, every few moments letting out a howl of pain so searing I knew I’d never watch that film again.
There was something in that line of mothers, in the bare fact of their grief, and how clear it was what the stakes were for them, that made me ashamed of myself. They had lost their sons to war. The sign I clutched in my hands seemed hollow in comparison, unearned, insincere. In that packed plaza, I ached for someone to get on stage and take the microphone. I ached for some kind of proceeding to begin. I ached for something outside me to quiet my own false voice. I wanted a reason to fall silent and listen, rather than struggle to be a part.
*
One Friday late in May my junior year, when all my friends were on their way to Caesar’s, I lied and told them I had to help my dad with something and would meet up with them later. But instead of going home, I took the long path through the park to Diversey Harbor, then passed under the bridge of Lake Shore Drive, out to the little amphitheater of stone that overlooked the harbor inlet and the endless blue width of the lake itself.
That day, I sat on the stone ledge and just thought things over for a while. I think I felt I wanted to remove myself from everything that was expected of me. I think I was trying—though it would’ve been impossible then—to step outside the fog for a minute and see the past two years from farther away: the video of the beheading; the incident at school with the gun; the march to Federal Plaza; why I’d felt so out of place.
I thought about what I’d done for Ryan by hiding the gun. Did he love me for what I did? Maybe. He was certainly appreciative. He threw his arm around me and called me a mensch, and kept on doing so for months. But, if anything, the result of that day was that his and Jana’s love was even more fully cemented, the two of them even more inseparably connected, because despite what I’d done to help him, what she had done was greater.
I thought about how it was—or why it was—that Jana loved Ryan. He farted in class. He’d sneak up behind her after gym, his shirt soaked with sweat, and catch her in a bear hug. He’d go off with us and not return her calls. He would lie to her about where he was. He’d drink too much, and become cruel. For a long time, I thought to show someone something in yourself that you weren’t proud of was a bad thing. I thought you were meant to hide it, and that if you did, it might come to not exist.
Nina once told me that she never felt she truly knew me. She said there was something remote in me, something she felt she couldn’t reach. It was only when I was drinking heavily, she said, and how I acted toward her then, that she believed I really loved her. I write those words and almost cannot breathe at how sad that seems.
Much later in my life, I’d wake one morning thinking about movies, and if they’d given me a mistaken understanding about how love between two people forms. Love in movies seems like something that happens to you, rather than something that you build with someone else. I saw one once where two strangers sit beside each other on a cross-country bus. He spills his suitcase in her lap. She falls asleep against his shoulder. They make small remarks about the passing landscape, and by the time they reach Cleveland, you’re supposed to believe that it would be impossible for them to go back to their other partners, their other cities, their other lives.
Whatever love is, the movie suggested that it happens in an instant, and that its spell will be silent and mutually acknowledged. So I turned the movie off believing that’s how love works, and that when it arrived in my life, it would bloom from a similar lack of volition.
Those films, I came to see, didn’t teach me anything about vulnerability. They didn’t teach me what seemed to come so effortlessly to Ryan: that to be loved, you have to risk something. That to be loved, you have to give someone else the chance to see you as you are. To be loved, you have to admit that you desire another person. In the face of the possibility that they might not say it in return, you have to admit that you need them.
Ryan, I see now, couldn’t help but be entirely himself. Back then, I thought that Jana loved him in spite of that. Now I see that she loved him because of it. To appease, to please—I thought that that was what would make a person love me: to reflect back what I thought they wanted, or who I thought they wanted me to be.
And I changed who I was to accommodate. Or perhaps that is simply who I am—a reflection—or at least that is the person I’ve become.
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From Great Disasters by Grady Chambers. Used with permission of the publisher, Tin House Books. Copyright © 2025 by Grady Chambers.
