My Tears are not a Grief Gauge
Crying through Ages and Stages
Hi friends and Xandwichers, I’m thrilled to share that I’m participating in a special collaboration running throughout September called “Caring about Crying: We all Cry. You’re not Alone.” Shout out to our Carer-in-Chief at Carer Mentor for inviting me to participate as one of 13 team members in this collaborative experiment. The goals are to connect with other writers and to explore an under-appreciated human phenomenon. You will find a list of the pieces that have already been published from this anthology at the bottom of my post.
Several of my fellow team members have already shared their stories and experiences with crying, exploring the feelings, meanings, and attitudes - inward and outward - that are intertwined with this often taboo but fundamentally human act. I’m following Louisa Wah at Lily Pond who wrote yesterday about the Healing Power of Tears. I am exploring how my inclination to cry doesn’t always align with when and how much I think I ‘should’ cry, how I judge myself for it, and how crying changes throughout our lives.
I’ve traveled through the Mexico City airport dozens of times, but two days ago was the first time I had been there since my dad died in Mexico just over six months ago. I was caught off guard by the visceral memories that came flooding back. I walked back up the same jetway that I had walked down on my way home, tears streaming down, still in disbelief at what had happened. I immediately recognized the spot where I had stood weeping and begging an Aeromexico attendant to reroute my flight as soon as possible, in my (unsuccessful) attempt to get to my dad before he took his last breath. This time, all the feelings came back, but without the tears.
Flash back to almost a year ago, I had just returned from a work trip to Colombia, sick with covid, and got one of those calls that those of us with vulnerable loved ones dread: my dad had taken a nasty fall and broken his leg. He quickly went into surgery, which was successful, but when he came out of the anesthesia, he was not himself. He struggled to place where he was, to remember what had happened, and speak in coherent sentences. Even more upsetting, my normally relaxed and jovial dad suffered severe delusions, often at night, that repeatedly involved paranoid stories and harmful behaviors like trying to get up and walk on a broken leg and ripping out medical devices.
His health had been declining over the past few years, both physically and cognitively, and the fall and surgery were a both a painful turning point. When my stepdad started to talk about moving my dad to a nursing home in Mexico, I began to panic. How many more times after that would I see him? Would he ever see his son, my brother again? Or his grandkids? Is this the choice he would have made for himself if of sound mind?
I worried constantly. And for the first time in a while, I cried a lot. Intense ugly tears streamed at all times - sitting at home, driving in the car, while visiting my dad, or out running errands. I felt such grief, sadness, fear and anger - and I truly felt it. It came out constantly in salty, viscous waves that I had no choice but to ride to exhaustion. My dad was still here but it was happening, I was losing my father and the parent I was closest to.
I managed to make some peace with my dad being moved to Mexico. When he died suddenly a few months later, I certainly cried a lot, especially at first, but those tears felt different. I was responding to the trauma of the way things had unfolded, my head and heart were racing, but I was not sitting in the grief and allowing myself to simply feel and process it.
The weeks and months followed were a blur, but somehow the tears didn’t flow with the same intensity they had when the cognitive loss set in and the physical loss was still impending. I also didn’t cry like I thought I would at my dad’s memorial, despite the fact that his death has been undoubtedly the biggest loss of my life.
A short burst of tears came when I realized that the box my stepdad was holding contained my dad’s ashes, but somehow I got through my speech about him without a breakdown - which I never would have thought imaginable. I felt both a numbness, and moments of self-consciousness that I wasn’t weeping like a baby. Despite having shed a lot of tears here and there, I sometimes think that the full river of emotion from his death remains behind a dam that I’m still waiting to completely burst. My glass of tears still feels half empty, I still needed a complete cry.1
Do our tears reflect the true depth and intensity of feeling inside, like a rain gauge for our emotions? I don’t think that’s true for me, but perhaps it does reflect how much we are allowing ourselves to actually feel and surface the emotion inside.
I’ve found that anticipatory grief, and the long goodbye can be even more painful - or somehow easier for me to feel and express outwardly - than the final one. My mother is still alive, but I had episodes of deep disenfranchised grief when her decline began. In these cases I think there were many emotions besides just grief causing the tears - namely anger and fear. In the case of my dad, reality may also have been too much to bear, and the logistics of memorial planning (and then back to caring for children, and mom, and brother and the business of life…) an easy out to refocus my attention away from the sadness. As I wrote back in June:
I’ve subconsciously learned to build up a protective barrier that includes tackling all the logistics I can in order to march toward progress, and maybe to avoid the sadness.
Ages and Stages of Tears
As babies, crying is the first and most critical form of communication, a way that we express our needs to others. As kids, adolescents and adults, it’s a way that we show our vulnerability and trigger connection and compassion. But it’s still a great mystery what triggers the actual release of tears. Is the act of crying the final stage of true feeling and emotional expression? What does it mean and what impact does it have if we don’t get there with our emotions, or we suppress them? Why does it change over time?
My dad was always a softie, easy to become emotional and express it, and never ashamed to let the tears flow. I think it’s one of the qualities that made him so lovable. People in his life could easily see how much they meant to my dad, how they touched his life and how much he appreciated them. As he got older, my dad cried a lot more, and much more easily. Just listening to a song, or sharing a story about someone he loved would trigger tears.
Sometimes it admittedly made me uncomfortable. Did the magnitude of his emotional response feel disproportionate? Did I wonder if it was the dementia that was altering his emotions? My mother fluctuated between stoic and emotionally volatile, so perhaps this made witnessing emotion from a parent feel unsafe. Or maybe it is just hard to sit in that deep feeling and vulnerability with someone, without trying to fix it.
I generally don’t cry as much as I did even 10 or 15 years ago. I used to cry fairly easily at any sad movie, with any personal conflict, or happy moment. Now, it takes a lot more to release the tears. Sometimes I miss it, and I wonder where those tears have gone and why they hide away. I know it’s exhausting to have a good cry, but I also usually feel better afterward. But the reality of midlife with kids and parents and a sibling to care for perhaps doesn’t leave much time or space for sitting with emotions.
What amount of crying is “normal” or a “healthy” counterpart to various levels of emotion - like grief? How do you know when you’ve ‘gotten it all out’ or are suppressing emotion?
I was so intrigued to listen to Rev Benjamin Perry talk about his experiment crying every day. I still don’t understand exactly how he conjured the tears, but maybe I need to try it.
This piece included more questions than answers - please chime in with your thoughts in the comments! And leave me a ❤️ if you enjoyed it so that others can find Gen Xandwich and our Caring about Crying Collaboration. Up next: Kristina from After he said Cancer.
The Caring About Crying Anthology. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone.
Sept 1 Launch article: Caring About Crying. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 2 Crying: 'Did you know?' Resource: Tears the science and some art. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 3 'Cry, Baby. Why Our Tears Matter' A Podcast Interview. Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris of Ten Percent Happier with Reverend Benjamin Perry. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 4 ‘In Conversation with Rev. Benjamin Perry’. Victoria interviews the Author of 'Cry Baby: Why Our Tears Matter' By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sept 5 ‘My stoic mom's parting gift: Making peace with tears’ By Sarah Coomber at Sandwich Season
Sept 6 We Invite You to 'Care About Crying'. By Victoria on behalf of the team.
Sept 6 ‘ICU Special Edition: There's Crying in Baseball?’ By Nurse Kristin at HCT:Heal Cure Treat
Sept 7 Triggered. Caring About Crying Anthology By Kristina Adams Waldorf, MD at After He Said Cancer and Anne at The Future Widow
Sept 8 'Can't Cry. Want to Cry??' A Caregiver's Paradox of Human-ing. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration
Sep 9 ‘AWC Town Bulletin - On Crying’ By Tiffany Chu and Bakhtawar at Asian Writers Collective
Sep 10 The Healing Power of Tears By Louisa Wah at Lily Pond
I loved Louisa’s description yesterday of a complete cry.
Anna, your exploration of how tears show up in different times and stages of your grieving adds texture and nuance to our individual and collective experience of crying. Your account of your grief for your father reminds me of my own. The emotions were so complex, conflicting and overwhelming, that I did not shed tears during his last few months, when I was his main caregiver. I think adrenaline and cortisol definitely flooded my system and drove me to handle the critical tasks at hand. I also became deeply depressed. But my eyes were dry. I felt numb. It wasn't until I went back home and received a phone call about his death, that I burst out in unbridled tears. And then tears would come and go in the next few years. I think your article raises a very important point about not judging a person's level of sadness and grief based on the amount of tears they shed. There are simply too many elements at play, and crying is truly an experience unique to each and every one of us.
It's so helpful to hear your questions, Anna. I feel similarly to you. Questioning myself.
I know my pain and endurance were stretched further and further in the dark days of caregiving, aka numbed. Perhaps this stamina or endurance recalibrates the threshold for tears. Perhaps the tears are not behind a dam, but the stress, cortisol, etc. are more potently concentrated in the smaller amount of tears when they're shed. I think I prefer this thought to being on edge about a dam bursting!
The more we share, the more I see how unique and individual our tears and crying are, especially when they are associated with grief.
On the flip side, I think about recent opportunities to sit in nature and listen to music that felt more poignant and wondrous than before. Are we more sensitised to revel in the joy-filled moment now because we are more potently charged?
No right or wrong. Hoping we experience wonder and joyful tears and lose any worries of when and how we 'release' tears.
Also, one thing I'm aware of is that the more I moved (Walk-run-walked), the less 'keyed up' I felt, so perhaps movement enables a similar release for the body as tears.