A Love Letter to My City After Its Most Violent Year

{Note: another version of this post was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 1/5/22.}

Dear Philadelphia,

As far as I can tell, there are three venues where all Philadelphians are forced to interact, however much we may desire to avoid one another: the emergency room waiting area, the jury selection room, and the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). Whatever a Philadelphian’s race, class, or personality, you force us together in these rooms to tolerate one another for hours at a time, even as a pandemic and record-setting violence in your streets incline us toward isolation.

This letter is mainly about my trip to the emergency room on Tuesday, December 14. But I also spent that morning at the DMV, and throughout the day my wallet held a summons for jury duty, where I was ordered to report some four weeks later on my fortieth birthday. It also happened to be the feast day of St. John of the Cross, who famously penned The Dark Night of the Soul. Was this all circumstantial? Philadelphia, you are more Catholic than I am. You tell me.

My day began at the DMV at 8th and Race, where the chairs were spaced out further than I recalled from four years ago. It’s a COVID-era protocol, but one I hope they sustain after the pandemic. After all, the DMV can be a cramped place, so I didn’t mind a little distance between myself and the lady falling asleep to my left. It’s also a chatty place — a place for earbuds, those substitute friends that insulate me from other Philadelphians. When the clerk called my number, he looked through and around me while reciting the photo instructions. At first I assumed he hated his job. Only later I considered that his stare may be borne of frustrated attempts to communicate with people through their headphones. I removed them. When my new license was ready he made eye contact for the first time and offered a wish, or maybe a prayer, that God would bless me.

From the DMV I biked toward an appointment in West Philadelphia. I had passed the Art Museum, climbed the arc of the Spring Garden bridge, and passed over the Schuylkill River when it happened: with no prior sound of horn or brakes, I was struck from behind by a car moving at what eyewitnesses told me was at least thirty miles an hour. After an eternal moment in the air I landed on my back and raised my head just enough to see a white, lowriding hatchback speed away and eventually disappear across the bridge into Mantua. I was bloody and numb, but quickly realized that I was not going to die of vehicular manslaughter.

Philadelphia, 2021 did not become your deadliest year because of traffic deaths. Your record number of homicides are overwhelmingly due to gun violence, as you know. But in 2020, your streets saw a nearly 90% increase in traffic deaths compared with recent years, this with fewer cars on the road during the pandemic.

Hear me: I don’t know the suffering of those who have lost loved ones on your streets. Neither have I experienced a permanent disability during your most violent year, as others have. Still, on that bridge I woke to a painful reality that they already knew: We are not all equally threatened, but each Philadelphian’s life is fragile. Just ask the occupants of your emergency rooms. 

The ER waiting area can be as cramped as the DMV, but since the wait is usually longer and our helplessness greater, it is more difficult to ignore your people, Philadelphia. In fact, our helplessness is the only thing that we all have in common in that room — if any of us could be anywhere else, we would be. This helplessness can even create a sort of kinship between us. I have watched parents lacking English try to explain their son’s symptoms while he languishes, and begun to pray with the fervor of a blood relative that he would be seen next. I once cheered through a Flyers game alongside a homeless patient as we watched the full 2:00 am replay on an overhead TV (we had already seen the game played live a few hours earlier). Philadelphia, my common helplessness with your people, in those places and times, made them my people, and my heart began to break for them. On that Tuesday, I didn’t even use my earbuds.

To be honest, I didn’t get the names of any guests in the Pennsylvania Hospital ER waiting room that day. I am grateful to the doctors and nurses who discharged me after a few X-rays to tend to an impossible volume of incoming patients, but again, I don’t recall their names. Neither did I get the name of the DMV clerk who blessed me just before my life was spared. But there are two names that I will never forget.

Immediately after the impact, Larry Wise parked his car to block other traffic and likely saved my life. When the ambulance was slow to arrive, Katie Brindley helped me up, drove me to the hospital and passed me off to my wife, who four days later threw a surprise party for my fortieth birthday. She had been planning it for months, and I just about missed it. But I didn’t, because of Larry, Katie, and other ordinarily heroic Philadelphians.

In The Dark Night of the Soul, St. John teaches that none of us love as we ought. We are loved into loving through an uncomfortable process — a “dark night” — by which God purges our selfish instincts to make room for love, like a fire refining gold by removing impurities. Philadelphia, your people have often been God’s refining instruments, though I usually block up my ears to ignore their very existence.

On that Tuesday, I was loved into loving you, Philadelphia. Of course, this is how the Gospel always works — undeserved love is aimed at a reluctant recipient, and then somehow makes enough room for itself to overflow back out into the world.

I am trying to say that I love you, Philadelphia, even after your most violent year. But it’s not because you deserve it. I love you because God first loved me, and keeps loving me through your people.

Affectionately,

John Alexander