“Tears, Idle Tears”

Thank you to all the people who left notes about “Remembering.” That is a piece of writing straight from my heart. As I reread what I had written, as I read what you have written to me, tears come to my eyes, but they are tears that I don’t mind shedding, what I have learned to think of over the years as “good tears.”

I have always been a person who cries. As a child, this was discouraged. I learned to feel ashamed of myself when I cried. My father put a chart on the kitchen wall, and I got a gold star for every day the tears didn’t well up into my eyes. I got very few gold stars.

Jokes are made about the “stiff upper lip” of the English but certainly for women of my generation, crying was not acceptable. It was very hard for me, as a natural cryer, to live like this. I learned to hide it, and to this day, even though I accept myself as I am these days, I still cry quietly, almost unobtrusively. When I was going through radiation, I had a considerable amount of fatigue and discomfort intestinally. Although I was able to do some bike riding {my cure for depression} it obviously wasn’t enough because, without realizing it, I slid back into depression.

Now, in depression, one does not think straight. I actually knew quite well when the radiation would stop because it was marked on my calendar and I was doing a countdown. I had been told that the fatigue, cramping and diahorrea would eventually go away, but my depressed mind was telling me that the moderate discomfort I was experiencing was actually severe pain and that the tiredness and pain would go on forever. So, one morning, I came to be radiated, and all through the treatment I cried. I cried so silently that only when I got up and the technician was pulling off the cover I lay on did she notice the wet patches and realize what was happening.

I would like to cry loudly, to cry out in anguish with great whooping noises, but my early conditioning was such that {with the one exception when I heard the message about Jim’s death} I still cry as unobtrusively as possible. However, I am pleased that I have learned to accept myself as a cryer and to understand that this is my way of dealing with stress. And with joy…