Waiting for the waterworks to begin again
Grief without tears hurts, even when you can’t feel anything
Knowing the physical impact of grief and having a profound idea of my own mortality after several major life losses is a terrible combination to navigate. It’s even worse when I can’t even cry.
I’ve internalized about 3 years’ worth of grief and counting, and I realized long ago how much it’s taken a toll — physically, if not emotionally. I haven’t really cried since before my sister died 2 years ago,1 and that’s been the toughest and most frustrating loss to navigate. And except for collaging with papers and other materials E left behind, I haven’t been able to translate whatever grief I can feel into art.
My childhood was a weepy one. The dumbest things would make me cry, like the time in first grade when I farted in class and bawled in the middle of the floor while everyone laughed at me. Years of bullying about my weight and general awkwardness didn’t help. “You’re too sensitive!” my parents would yell at me to shut down the tears. It didn’t always work.
I did cry at my mom’s burial 4 years ago; it was a rare moment when F felt compelled to console me. But that may have been the last time I really wept. After that, I was sad when Young, a favorite former colleague of mine,2 died suddenly from pancreatic cancer in his mid-40s. I was devastated when Jay, my journalism mentor and one of my dearest college friends, passed away at age 83. Yet both times, I don’t remember tears.
And then E died a month after Jay’s memorial service. Her passing — unexpected but not surprising after years of health issues — left me downright numb.
Years of Lexapro may be part of this; SSRI antidepressants like that drug can take you from immense sadness to absolutely no feelings at all. Even with my history of depression, I would almost kill to feel something. I know the grief is eating at me, but I can’t feel it, and I can’t imagine that’s healthy.
I’m not sure I can really make myself cry, though there’s lots of Internet advice on how to do so.
If I can’t weep, I want to work through the grief and feel something before it somehow takes me down. I’m not inclined to do that regularly in this space; I hope that when I do write about it, it helps someone. Not in a here’s-how-to-get-through-it way, but in a you’re-totally-not-alone way.
Andrea Gibson has been on my mind, largely because of the documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light” — one of the most life-affirming films I’ve ever seen — now on Apple TV. (The fact that it didn’t make me weep, though I came close, means I’m in worse shape than I thought.) I didn’t even know who this poet was when they died in July at age 49, and the more I learn about them, the more I regret not knowing their work sooner.
In their last television interview, alongside wife and fellow poet Megan Falley, they recounted a moment when they struggled with sadness and physical pain as they fought Stage 4 ovarian cancer. Falley said she turned to Gibson, whose emotionally raw work somehow brims with joy amid rage and pain, in their despair.
“If you can’t be happy,” she told Gibson, “be funny.”
My God, I thought. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for so long, even before everyone started dying on me a few years ago. Sometimes, as Falley points out in the interview, it does ease the pain to have others give you laughter. But when it’s one of maybe a couple of things you do regularly to fend off the chronic fog of despair, it doesn’t necessarily make everything okay.3
Dealing with grief, like grief itself, is a highly complex thing. It haunts me from the back of my mind, even in my emotionally calcified state. When I had a job, I tried to work through it; after last spring’s layoff, I tried to plow through with art and rest and writing. And yes, laughter. But it feels like there’s much more to be done. Therapy, yes; I’m overdue to start that again (God and health insurance willing). But there’s more than that.
Tears won’t fix it entirely. It just feels like an enormous component that’s missing for me. Grieving without tears seems like, say, trying to lose weight without eating less. Sure, there’s drugs for that now, but even that’s not enough. There’s still more to be done.
And I know there’s never truly a conclusion to grief; I’d just like to take a few tear-strewn steps to move it along. With feeling.
November 25, 2023 — five days before what would have been E’s 67th birthday
Young made my 5 years as a corporate contractor tolerable. Oddly enough, my “work spouse” connected me with his actual wife, who hired me at my last job.
I didn’t learn till after I finished my first draft of this post that Gibson actually had written a few times about tears, once expressing gratitude that they cried all the time, because “nothing tells the truth better than my tears. … Crying is how I live through what I think I can’t survive. Crying is how I let go of what I think I cannot let go.“
As no stranger to grief, I can relate to much of what you say. While I cry plenty, I also think that grief is just a weight that you carry with you... always and that tears are not always required to acknowledge that weight, sometime grief is so tiring that there isn't any energy left for crying. Therapy definitely helps.