I Didn't Know
I have a photo of myself at the Boston Marathon. I am walking past one of the bombers.
I didn’t know. Nobody did. That’s the whole point.
The photo is grainy, shadowed. A circle drawn around a figure. I encountered it after the fact- looking at a screen, a news image, and suddenly recognizing myself inside the event. That moment of recognition is something I have never fully known what to do with. Because I was there. Not as a bystander in the clean, distant sense of the word.
It was Marathon Monday. We had been at the Red Sox game. Sitting above the Green Monster, I told a friend: I finally feel like I’m coming to terms. It was the first time I had celebrated anything since losing my son, the one I had fought to adopt, and had to give back to a broken system.
I had grit in my mouth and smoke in my lungs. I watched the wave of people rise from the bleachers, sequential, coordinated, like a stadium wave, and then it crested and came toward me like an ocean, beautiful and vicious. I understood that I was about to be enveloped by it, and I stood frozen, genuinely trying to decide if what I thought had happened had actually happened, or whether it was merely a gas explosion. Whether any of this was actually happening to me.
My older self is grateful I can no longer fully remember. But there are pieces. Memories that pull and cut when you actually sit and think about them.
There are spheres of influence around any catastrophe. At the center are those who were killed, who were injured, who lost limbs, who lost people. Their claim is unambiguous. Their suffering has a shape the world can see.
Then there are those who live outside the epicenter - who carry the reverberations, but not enough, they tell themselves, to call it their own.
I lived in the gray space between. For some people, I was the closest human they knew to the epicenter. For others, I had no idea what had happened until it was over. My place in those spheres was completely inconsistent. Central to some people’s experience of that day. Invisible in my own.
And so I did what people like me do. I went back to work.
I walked from Ruggles, not certain why I was going into the office, and yet certain there was no other place to be. The city was holding its breath.
Lockdown.
I watched what remained unfold. A constant stream. Updates. The city I had walked through the day before reduced to a manhunt, street by street, until the boat. He was found hiding under a cover inside a boat. A good hiding place. Not enough.
And I understood something then that I would spend years refusing to understand. This is what I ask donors to do. To sit with something devastating on a screen. To watch suffering from a safe distance and feel moved enough to act. I had built a career on that exact mechanism — the careful, curated distance between witness and event. I just never expected to be on both sides of it at once.
At my core, I am a fundraiser. I spend my days mapping problems, building cases for support, convincing people that solutions exist. And slowly, quietly, through the intellectual rigor of it, you start to believe you understand the problems themselves.
The lie of fundraising is the myth of the neutral narrator. The role requires it. To do this work you must believe, or perform believing, that you are outside the thing you are describing. That suffering is something you witness, not something you carry.
I remember sitting in my office trying to write the story of a donor who had been hit and dragged by a bus losing his right leg. His story breaks my heart and resurrects it at the same time.
I was supposed to turn it into language that would move people to invest in the medical center that saved his life. And sitting there, with his story in my hands, all of it felt stupid and small and wrong and not enough. Not because his story wasn’t worth telling. But because I was the one telling it, vacant, unacknowledged, pretending I was simply a skilled observer, and somewhere between Boylston Street and that desk, I had stopped believing that language could hold what actually happens to a human body. To a human life.
I was good at it. I am good at it. The same skills that made me good at it, the ability to hold suffering at arm’s length, to narrate it with precision and distance, were the same skills that kept me from acknowledging what happened to me on Boylston Street. Trauma hollows you from the inside. Fundraising asks you to narrate from the outside. I had been doing both at once for years and never let myself name it.
The body keeps its own record.
Five years after the bombing, I was driving home from Wegman’s. Going through my divorce. An ordinary afternoon. There was a bang. Thunder. I drove myself off the road. My body knew before my mind did. It had never fully left that street.
The guilt of invisible wounds is its own particular weight. My trauma is not death. It is not lost limbs. It has nothing to show for itself, no shape the world can recognize, and so I have spent years not counting myself among the people I raise money to help.
I want to give myself grace for that. I cannot. Here I am: alive, intact, legs under me, lungs full of clean air. I didn’t think I could break further. And then I did. And then I did again. The bombing landed on top of something already shattered — a grief with no funeral, no shape the world could recognize, no name anyone had given me permission to use.
But here is what I know professionally, what I have built a career on, what I have asked thousands of donors to believe: invisible suffering is still suffering. That people who survive hard things deserve support. That you do not have to have lost everything to have lost something real.
I have spent years arguing that. I just never let myself receive it.
I did not find my way back through therapy or time or someone finally telling me I was allowed. I found it here. In the dismantling. In finally putting the marathon on the page and letting it breathe.
There is a photo of me walking past one of the bombers. I didn’t know. I was just there, ordinary, inside someone else’s catastrophe which is, I’ve come to understand, exactly where I have always been doing my work.
The story was always mine. I just kept giving it away.
-keirahaley.com
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.