A Brief Meditation on Tears

I skipped the Akhu dua because I needed to speak to my mother at length, so I did my own ceremony and spent a long time by the ancestor shrine. By the time that was over, it was already 5pm and the chat was probably winding down as well, so I didn’t log on. I was also crying something fierce, which would have made internet-ing hard...

Not crying because I was sad, but because half-way through my conversation with her (simple, humble stuff: there’s a problem with the dog again…no, I’m not sure dad knows what to do about it…my brother can’t take her because he got a cat…) I remembered how much I miss talking to her. I’ve discovered that one of the curious things about grief is how stealthily it sneaks up on you, disguised as simple longing. How it comes as a wave in moments when you least expect it, washing over you momentarily, then tugging at your heart as it recedes, leaving you on the shore exactly as you were, but wetter. And I was wet—my face was soaked and some of that salted water had splashed onto the altar in front of me. I almost wiped them away, but I stopped short of disturbing those little drops.

Tears are an offering. Salt and water is gifted from within us and as I thought on it, I realized: this manifestation of grief is a form of purification. Then my mind expanded on the idea rapidly. Maybe it doesn’t just apply to grief…maybe crying itself is a form of purification. I think I even remember Hemet (AUS) saying something like that once.

It’s a hard thing to wrap around though, because I’ve spent most of my life thinking of tears as something bad. I was shamed often as a child for crying too easily. The incident I remember most strongly was being forced to watch Where the Red Fern Grows in fourth grade and just balling at the end when the dogs died, just completely unable to stop…and all the kids pointed and laughed at me for “crying like a little kid”…and the teachers just let them, I think because they were just as annoyed with me. To this day, I hate crying in public and the question “Are you crying?” gets an automatic childishly exaggerated “No!” even if it’s obvious that I am.

Yet, at the same time, if I look back on my private thinking over the years, and at the stories I’ve written, I always found tears to be powerful things. It’s a common trope in media that tears of love (of grief in particular) can do everything from breaking spells to bringing people back from the dead…often inexplicably. They are used as signals of groundbreaking change within a character’s psyche, and as leverage to break characters out of behavior which is harmful to others. I’ve embraced those tropes and used them liberally in my own works, which seems completely at odds with my own life experience.

And trying to hold those two beliefs in myself simultaneously—that tears are a sign of weakness, but also that tears can be powerful—has led to a lot of personal confusion over how I should react when I am crying or when someone else is crying. But if I start to view tears as a form of purification…that puts crying firmly in the camp of being powerful. Which makes a lot of sense: genuine tears are things which cannot be forced, and often are just as unstoppable as they are elusive. And if scientific consensus is anything to go by, humans are also the only animals who cry in connection with their emotions and not just to clean irritants out of the eye—which makes it part of what defines us as humans (whether we are socially comfortable with tears or not, I’d say that makes them pretty important).

But at the same time, I wonder if my thinking is too simplistic here. It’s commonly ignored that tears are not just a signal of sadness or grief, and that a whole range of human emotions are expressed by crying: anger, frustration, fear, happiness, inspiration, embarrassment, humor, etc. In all cases though, genuine tears signify that whatever we are feeling, we are really feeling it. And they are clearly able to affect others because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many tropes about them and crocodile tears wouldn’t be a thing. It almost makes me wonder if some of the shaming around crying in public (or crying at all) is really just a means of trying to reign that in or deny someone that power. I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts about this and not all of them are coherent yet. I think it is worth internalizing, though, that tears can be purifying and that they can be offerings, regardless of what other purposes they can serve.