“Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes” – Jean Rhys
I always excelled at staring contests. It’s a cultivated skill. Without too much effort, I can turn everything off, blank out, and suspend time. It works great for balancing yoga poses. And I have to say that even though it’s probably not the optimal way to approach the milestones of life, it works for me in its own crooked way.
Funerals, graduations, births, tragedies, all have come and gone with barely a tear. Extreme sadness, extreme happiness–I stare and take in details, like a reporter preparing to write a detailed expose. It is in the off times that I weep, sometimes silently, sometimes convulsively. Crying is a language I both avoid and crave. Even though hormones have weakened me to the point where weddings of strangers break me up, and movies (God help me) can trigger a deluge, when it’s something really important, I am still stoic.
I went to the wedding of my firstborn prepared, expecting actually, to let loose the floodgates. I was supposed to, right? Instead, I watched the proceedings with wonder. She walked down the aisle, the train needed adjusting, my little one needed to be pulled back into the pew, the music was amazing. For a split second, something tugged at me, so I pulled into that place of intense stillness. “Phew,” I thought, “Good job. You got through this one.” A purse full of tissues, waterproof mascara—unused insurance.
But, just as in the weeks after the terrible September (the first year when three of them went away to school at the same time); and the months after my mom and grandmother passed, the tears found a way. Vivid memories remain of sitting on the floor, going through the bookshelf with “Goodnight Moon” and “Runaway Bunny,” sobbing uncontrollably. Knowing that it would happen, and deliberately going in that room to turn the sorrow on, day after day. Allowing myself to picture them in their pjs, cuddled up in my lap, still damp from the bath.
Driving home in the car after having cleaned out my mother’s closet, with her tattered sweatshirt next to me, wailing, and in some perverse way not wanting the wailing to stop. Ever. Pulling out the shirt, that still held the scent of her, to restart the pain, again and again, on command. Planting a garden with my grandmother’s favorite flowers that still cause my eyes to tear up when I see them. What is this masochism?
For the last few months, I’ve been having my moments. Fleeting images lodge in my heart and expand, demanding an escape route. Sometimes I get away with little bits that I can shove back into their lockbox; but usually I am in their thrall, surrendering to a bittersweet bliss that I cannot understand or control. This is not so much sadness as a remembering, a portal to times and mementos that were so ordinary, so banal, that I never would have predicted their import. They are the substance of my life, which is, after all, very ordinary.
When they were young, I read those children’s books again and again, until at times I loathed them, begging for variety, hiding them, offering other alternatives. Now transformed, like my mother’s sweatshirt, and my grandmother’s dianthus, they evoke all that matters—unlikely talismans. When I weep at the thought of my Gam, it is no longer grief, but some odd combination of connection, gratitude, and hope. Savoring how good it all has been; and is. That things now unnoticed will be revealed as something more, readily accessible if I don’t mind them coupled with tears.
The moment of her walking down the aisle hasn’t ripened yet. Perhaps it will someday. Perhaps not. The emotions now are from the bits that float randomly through me as I process her growing up. Little smiles, ordinary moments. All past. All very much present. They have been stirred up, and I have the joy of experiencing them again, holding their fullness in my heart until it bubbles up into my throat and spills out of my eyes.