Tears --

Tears -- I'm updating this piece -- welcome any comments/edits




Linda Morningstar told her when they were both in their twenties that her tears “had all been cried up – tears ducts all dried out.” She’d said it in a peppy way, laughter in her voice, as they’d driven around town in Linda’s Mazda GLC, running some errand related to their jobs. They hadn’t known each other for long at that point, and she believed it was said in service of the ‘spiral of intimacy’ – where two people reveal more and more as they test a new relationship. She’d learned that term in a college communications class. Linda, being the Director of Communications for the company they both worked for, well, she’d have known about the spiral.

“Really? I cry all the time. I wonder if I could have my tear ducts removed,” she’d answered, taking another step up and around.

It didn’t take long for the truth to be revealed, that Linda did indeed cry, and also whine and complain, and the friendship never took off. Perhaps they’d climbed that spiral a bit too far, or too quickly. Still, she remembered that line again and again over the decades, “all cried up … ducts all dried out”. She wasn’t even using that much hyperbole when she said she cried all the time. There were stretches where she cried every day, sometimes more than once. Without getting too Gabriel Garcia Marquez about it, she sometimes imagined her tears filling vessels of all shapes and sizes, from thimbles to Grecian urns, from puddles to lakes. More than that, she began to fear that grandmothers all around the world were right, that in the worst of a crying spell her face would freeze that way. She knew she wasn’t pretty when she cried the way some people are, like Natalie Portman or Laura Linney. If a lifetime of laughter could cause laugh lines around the eyes, if smoking could cause wrinkles around the mouth, couldn’t a life of crying distort a whole face? She was vain enough to give it some thought, but not so much as to make her brow furrow. She was trying to put off Botox for as long as possible.

Once she cried when she was walking across a field in the middle of campus and saw a young woman with a puppy, a little golden lab. Even if those were only Hallmark tears at a scene too cute for comfort, they hurt. In a stairwell of an old building at a different campus a lifetime later, she cried huge, gut wrenching, body wracking mortifying tears; there were no puppies around, just a classroom full of students waiting for her at the top of the stairs. Her tears ducts were not drying up at all. Instead, they were more like breast ducts, able to produce tears easily when stimulated, like a mother whose breasts fill even at the sound of a stranger’s child crying.

She had a cousin who cried fairly easily, but on her it was charming, her tears always appropriate, in context, quick to stop, her face returning to a smile with no puffy eyes or red nose to betray her, just a beautiful relaxed face freshened by a few tears. Joan’s tears were as mysterious to her as bubbles blown through a wand to a small child – where did they come from? Where did they go? It all happened so gently. Her own outbursts were neither charming nor gentle, and certainly not particularly interesting, and she knew she’d never show up in one of Oliver Sachs’ books, that there’d never be a title “The Woman Who Mistook her Shirt for a Kleenex”, and she began to envy people with Tourette’s, whose outbursts could be explained neurologically.

And then one day, that’s right, they stopped. She first noticed that they’d stopped while sitting in a movie theater with a group of friends, the aisle filled with people young and old, male and female. They were watching The Titanic, and if people weren’t crying at the poor children locked in the hull of a sinking ship they sure were by the time Leonardo DiCaprio lost his grip on that piece of driftwood, leaving the brave and tragic Kate Winslet to float away on the sea alone. Only two dry eyes in the house, and they were both hers. She understood the impulse to cry, after all, it was sad, it was sad just like the song said. Still, didn’t everyone know the outcome? Wouldn’t Leo and Kate be gorgeous on the red carpet accepting Oscars later that very same year? Please. Years later, watching Marley and Me with her gorgeous hunk of husband, didn’t he know that that adorable golden lab puppy would grow old and die? Was there a movie sad or sweet enough to bring tears? If so, she hadn’t found it.

That’s what it became over time, a quest for tears, because sometimes she missed them. At most she experienced a mild burning in her eyes, maybe a slight tingling in her tear ducts. When that happened she’d squint her eyes slightly, try to give the moisture a little shelf of skin on which to collect, perhaps form a tear that might even spill over onto a cheek. Once in a while a tiny tear would form in the inner corner of her eye, and she’d try to squeeze it out, but it was so scant that it wouldn’t roll even as far as her nostril. She re-read Sophie’s Choice. Nothing. Went through old photos of her father, her baby girl, and Hallmark cards – still nothing. She walked on campuses, abandoned graveyards, past the house where she grew up. Dry. Was Oliver Sachs finally going to show up and write the essay: “The Woman Who What? Walked About Life Normally, Seemingly Unperturbed? “ She was thoroughly without an audience, as no one notices the woman who isn’t crying.

Occasionally she’d recall that admonishment to be careful what you wished for, but eventually she became mostly content with her dried up tear ducts. She found other ways to shed her body’s excess liquid, mostly through dance, sometimes a bike ride, sometimes making love. It became precious to see the tears of her sentimental husband watching a touching movie, to feel the wetness of her daughter’s tears on her shoulder as she comforted her, to hug an elderly cancer survivor and absorb her tears, cheek to cheek.