CRYING

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”

― William Shakespeare, King Lear

Full disclosure:  I am a Facebook crier.  

Lately any video of returning military men and women surprising their children have turned me into a tectonic plate of quivering, emotional gelatin.

The moment of recognition, when those Keane-sized, waif eyes suddenly detect who they are seeing guts me.  But what really sends me over the edge is that powerful, magnetic pull sprint into those waiting for mommy and daddy arms where the kids burrow and nest and weep with joy, as if the power of love will keep their returned heroes forever planted like the Giving Tree that they are.

In that scenario, I’m both parties.  

I’m the abandoned child, standing on a ship’s dock or at the arrival gate of an airport terminal, holding a bouquet of fresh bought roses, scanning for the faces of my mom or dad amongst the high-speed blur of faceless exiting passengers.  (Because that is what we do from the moment that our parents die. For the rest of our lives. The word “goodbye” in that context means nothing more than “remember me”).

I’m also the dad, who every day, actively searches for my little, now grown up men, boys who somewhere deep in the rolling Van Gogh lavender fields of my brain, still sleep like warm limp bone-free rag dolls on my shoulder, sing with the passion of Caruso in the sudsy bathtub and or help me create hindsight footprints in serpentine sand trails as we walk quietly towards the sun, whose waning light seems to at once preserve the memory of now while completely erasing the specifics, which, finally, creates the fairy tale sense feeling (which we carry like a badge of honor) that any day spent with a child is a rebirth not unlike the sprouting tree buds or just waking and stretching like a newborn, first flowers of Spring.   

Loss of any kind is not just a feeling.  

It’s a formal dress of free-floating softness that encases us in a kind of invisible fragility which keeps our vulnerable, clay hearts in a perpetual state of high alert which is nothing more than a the courtesy of sirens, because the truth is when the memory of anyone who we ache for suddenly appears, with their flung wide open unreachable arms, we are spectacularly indefensible.

The only way to cope with an unfathomable loss, which punishes us like the current levels of global warming, is to cry.

Crying is the heart’s way of finding its own level.   The act of crying reboots us, reconfigures us, and finally, releases and retunes us until we have perfect pitch again.  And with that we regain our ability to sing, to dance and to love.

What comes pouring out of us like raging flood waters, are the complex ingredients, the suddenly broken secret codes and unlocked combinations of who we really are.  

We have simply reached our limit and the body electric has short-circuited which has prompted us, unconsciously, to bring in an expert in the field of sadness, who we have asked to scrub in and with ongoing communication with our crystal shattered psyche, begins to surgically release a torrent of not only pain, but every single thought and feeling that has haunted us, suffocated us, numbed us until our feelings are like centuries old scrapbook pictures that feel as foreign and as distant as any civilization which we cannot understand.

As we are sutured, the comfort of the ceremonially closing, which is like a perfectly stitched together eulogy, finally moves us to tears.

We forget the rules and expectations of vanity, defy the instructions which we follow with veneration and give back to the universe the very seeds that made us grow which we have through no fault of our own, forgotten how to plant and nurture.

We cry. And we cry.  And we cry.

That is when the conspiracy of signs and miracles beings as begins suddenly songs on the radio moments in the theater, and books that we’re reading suddenly all seem to be about us.

It is the outside world knocking on our doors, asking if we can come out and play.

There appear to be signs everywhere you look that give you the stunning permission to mourn openly and freely as any heartbroken toddler who needs little more than the comfort of a hushed and soothing, “there, there and the venerable, “everything is going to be alright.”  

The assurance of the invisible parent is the basic fuel of life, which keeps us right, centered and most importantly loved.  Sometimes, I think, we mistake our need for the Holy Father and Holy Mother for our real hunger: to be held by our returning war heroes, who return after any average work day, who despite the exhaustion that comes from the defeat of dreams, wants nothing more than to ask you, “How was your day?”

Tears are the holy water of our most private absolution and without them we would harden like the mistreated arteries of the heart.

We need to cry.  We have to cry.  In order to live.

When I see an interview on TV and the subject of the interview apologizes for crying, I’m bewildered.

What exactly are they apologizing for?  For being human?  For being overwhelmed by the kind of sorrow that we all feel in the privacy of prayer or in the daydreams which more often than not never ever come true?

Growing up, men did have the social permission to cry.  In moments of despair, they shielded their face like Asian women or sat in the rooms that they sent themselves to, to get over it.

There are a few holdovers from that era but those are the same people who are the ones who dispense the wisdom of racism because they are secretly prejudiced against themselves.

They need to cry.

We all need to cry. 

Especially today, because we are anguished over the loss of the potency of decency, civility, beauty, the respect for law and acts of kindness as much as we miss our fallen parents, brothers, sisters, mates, babies, grandparents, cherished friends and beloved pets who just minutes ago we sang a hushed lullaby to on the cold hard slab table of the vet's office,  as they stared at us with infinite trust and slowly wagged goodbye.

Eden has been overrun with fools who think, because that they are powerful that they are powerful.

But they are not.

Anyone who abuses you is impotent, weak, illiterate and scared to death.

The sun one day soon will erase them too.

And then we will all be able to walk in the sand once again, honor our own imprints and remember how lucky and blessed we are to be alive.