Tears. I have cried an ocean of
tears these last ten months. In my experience, tears of grief come in two different
ways: there’s the wave of grief that convulses my entire body and the tears
come flying out accompanied by cries of anguish, and then there are the quiet
tears that stream down my cheeks with no other physical symptom present.
I mention my tears in my grief journal
many times; here’s a sampling:
The amount of tears I have shed is truly astonishing, and
it is quite cathartic. It’s interesting watching the natural process of the
wave of grief wash over me. The wave hits, often out of nowhere, I wail and
shed tears, the wave crests and moves on, and the tears dry on my cheeks.
Sometimes the tears start and I
let them flow without making any noise, no sobbing, just sweet tears of grief
overflowing my eyes and streaming down my cheeks, I don’t even wipe them away, I
just let them dry there. It’s an exquisitely beautiful sensation, one I am
learning to cherish. This often happens when I’m driving.
I just looked at the front edge
of the desk, where I sit as I type, and it’s spotted—those are my tears over
the last weeks falling, falling. The spots are large, a half-inch in diameter.
Tears are amazing; sometimes I wonder how there can be so much fluid in reserve
to keep the tears rolling down my cheeks all through some of the worst moments
of despair.
This morning I went to a
concert that is part of a local ‘Amadeus’ festival. A beautiful clarinet
concerto moved me to tears. (Clarinet Concerto in A
major, K622, Adagio) This is something I always loved about Arthur; he was
easily moved to tears by a piece of music, or a poem, or a heartfelt expression
of any kind. That wasn’t true for me, and Arthur always wondered how I could
have a heart so closed that I couldn’t be moved by art. Now I understand. I
like the feeling of tears inspired by beauty.
I want to learn more about
tears. I have never cried like I have in the last four months. The tears seem
limitless, and so necessary, and so cleansing. In a meditations book a friend
gave me, the author writes: “To release the pressure of grief feels almost like
a phenomenon of physics—a matter of releasing internal pressure."
I love tears now. They are so
beautiful, so remarkable, so healing. I don’t understand them, but I am
grateful for them.
Just yesterday I read about a
new book called The Topography of Tears, by Rose-Lynn
Fisher, in Smithsonian
Magazine.
Ms Fisher likes to take photographs of things through microscopes, and one
day got the idea to photograph different types of tears. The images are
startling (the linked article includes images). Ms. Fisher was going through a
time of change and loss, she said, and had a lot of raw material for the study.
She also recruited other people’s tears for the photographs in the book.
What is startling is how different tears of
grief are from other types (although the article cautions the reader against
making any assumptions about the nature of tears based on the photos).
I learned from this article that there are
three different types of tears: 1. Basal tears, which our eyes release
continuously to keep the cornea lubricated, 2. Reflex tears, secreted in
response to an irritant, like a cut onion, and 3. Psychic tears, triggered by
emotions, from grief to joy. These three types of tears differ in their
molecular composition, which accounts for their difference under the
microscope.
According to Wikipedia, tears
produced during emotional crying have a chemical composition different from
other types of tears. In particular, they contain the
neurotransmitter leucine enkephalin, a
natural painkiller that is released when the body is under stress.
But why do we cry emotional tears? I went online and
read a variety of articles, and it seems fair to say that scientists don’t know
the answer. It does seem to be one of the only behaviors that separates humans
from animals; humans seem to be the only species that shed tears for
emotional reasons. Evolutionary psychologists say crying probably conferred
some benefit. The current hypothesis is that is a type of ‘social signal’ that
alerts your group that you are in trouble. Other evidence shows that looking at
photos of people with tears in their eyes evokes empathy, and that exposure to
the chemicals in emotional tears decreases aggression. In other words, crying
is an evolved strategy to obtain help from others in our group.
This all sounds very reasonable, and yet it doesn’t really
satisfy. For one thing, I do most of my crying alone. I’m not trying to
communicate anything to other people. Tears feel like they are an organic
response to great suffering. As I wrote in one of my journal entries, tears
feel necessary.
Suffering this great requires an audible, physical
expression. Just feeling it is not enough. Grief requires you to act it out in
the physical world. I understand now why people tear their hair and rend their
clothes when they are grieving. Actions like these are the imperative of grief.
Lynn Fisher, the photographer, is eloquent on the nature of
tears:
Tears
are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death,
as basic as hunger and as complex as a rite of passage. It’s as though each one
of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one
drop of an ocean.
Further reading:
