I’m not opposed to crying, it’s just not something I do.
This isn’t to say that I don’t feel awful, whine, complain or even know moments of transcendent joy and relief. I just very seldom express such things by leaking stuff from my eyes.
I didn’t cry when I learned my friend Andrew had died. Didn’t cry over 9-11. Came close during Gore’s concession speech. By the time it was Kerry’s turn I’d developed a thicker skin and felt mostly disgust. I didn’t cry at the births of any of my kids or at the miscarriages that punctuated them.
These events were each in their way powerful and moving beyond words and it takes very little effort to remember them vividly. When I do I get lost in them.
I prefer to know where I’m going.
The last time I remember losing it was over ten years ago. My then-fiance and I had two small cats. One of them got feline infectious peritonitis. And then pneumonia. We tried very hard to get her past it but it was not meant to be and our very good and compassionate vet told us as much. I was in the shower when I realized the truth that we were going to have to take her back to the vet and kill her. Gone. Naked and sobbing out of breath. Not yet an atheist and silently trying to bargain with a god I knew wasn’t going to come through because I wasn’t completely naive.
The only thing I can figure now that set me off then was the lose/lose choice I had to face. Kill the cat or let her suffer and die anyway. Both of which options were on me to choose. In the end we did the right thing, but only (as Americans are said to do) after having tried all other options. Today my fiance is my wife and the cat’s ashes rest in a box next to her collar and and a photo of her sleeping peacefully, curled up so small that she could fit in my palm.
So having now established that I don’t cry except when you make me kill something I love, I’d like to share something that came close. It’s an article by a doctor recounting his residency in the Infant Intensive Care Unit, a place where I would last all of five seconds before throwing myself out a window. Here it is. Don’t read it if you’re already depressed.
I’m still not a crier but as I’ve gotten older and more fatherly I find myself less able to read stuff like this without putting my face in my hands. That’s what I do instead of crying. I still don’t know if it’s to block out the information I’ve voluntarily put in front of me or to catch tears that ought to be there but aren’t. Maybe I’m trying to coax them out or maybe I’m trying to hide that they’re not there. Who knows?
I think it most likely that, for me at least, tears are an involuntary response to an unavoidable and shocking reality. I’m great at avoiding things and I’m hard to shock. When reading about some stomach-turning horror I can always put the paper down or close the screen. When going through it myself I can move on to some chore that requires me to attend it. A perk of parenthood is that such things are never lacking.
But the downside of having your emotional wires stripped as only deep love can do is that you empathize more with all your fellow travelers. You know it could be you in the story and even the merest acknowledgement of such pain drives you to put your face in your hands.
