Thomas Fiffer cries it out.
I cried tonight.
For the first time.
In a long time.
Really cried.
The shaking, sobbing, screaming, wailing kind of crying.
The kind that overtakes you.
The kind that takes over.
The kind of crying that rocks you to the rock that is your foundation.
The kind of crying that shakes—but doesn’t shatter—the diamond at the core of your soul.
I cried in my car, when I parked in my driveway, before I went inside my house.
My empty house.
I was sad, because my house is empty tonight, except for me.
No kids.
No partner.
Just.
Me.
My first ex-partner, my first ex-wife, is the mother of my children. I still feel a kind of love for her, unbelievably, despite all the craziness, despite all we went through. A kind of love for her, but not for the relationship. You can read about that all over my blog. No secrets there.
My second ex-partner, and soon to be second ex-wife, was ideal for about five minutes—well, make that about fifteen months. It was all peachy, and there was a lot of pretending and pretense. I loved what we had together, for a brief time, but I didn’t love having to be the heavy, the one standing on the wall (like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men), the one who had to say, no, I can’t do this anymore; this is unsustainable. She ran home when I got real.
Despite all this exxing out (another new word, exxing), I have a whole lot to be happy about, so on some level, the crying was inexplicable. In-ex-fucking-splicable. So I have some splic-ing to do. Here goes.
I have two amazing sons. They are miracle children, and I celebrate them every day. By simply being, they give me more joy than I could possibly ever have imagined. Ever. I am thankful for them.
I have a good job that pays the bills. I am thankful for that.
I have a loving, supportive family. I am thankful for them.
I have my health. I am thankful for that.
And I have, for the first time in a long, time, a pretty clear sense of direction. I thank myself for that. Because that’s something I’ve worked really hard to achieve.
On another level, my crying was completely explicable, if that’s a word. Fuck it. I don’t care if it’s a word. I’m using it. Explicable. Ex-fucking-splicable.
OK. How is it explicable?
Today, 36 years ago, my father died. I was nine. A kid. I didn’t really know what it meant, at nine, to lose your father, but I’ve figured it out, along the way. The hard way. Being a father has given me a lot of perspective. I’ve written a few posts about that loss, and a short story which I’ll send to anyone who wants to read it. I’m not asking for sympathy on this. Just telling it like it is.
Thirty-six years is a long time. An eternity, in human years. But even with all that time passing, all that water under the bridge, you never really recover. Not fully, not wholly. You just adjust. The wound is not raw anymore, but it’s still a wound, still present, still real. Wounds heal, as best we can heal them, but they never fully close. Not totally. Scars remain. And there’s still an opening, a hole, an entrance for vulnerability, a way for sadness to get in. No person can fill the God-shaped void that such a wound leaves.
So I cried. I cried about my losses. I cried about losing my father, my wife, two wives, time with my sons, my former girlfriends, my twenties, my thirties. I cried about all the people I’ve loved and lost. And all the people I’ll lose someday. Love and life. Life, and loss. Love and loss. It’s OK to cry about that. More than OK. Necessary. And it feels good. Really good. Cathartically good. You should try it, if you haven’t already.
I do feel lucky to have found, to have regained, at least one of the people I had lost. A special person. A person with whom I have a forever bond. You know who you are. And I’m lucky to have repaired my relationship with my family, regained some of the closeness lost during marriage number one. When it comes to your family, no matter what happens, you never really lose them, not entirely. You may lose touch, but you never lose the bond. There’s a kind of Superglue that transcends adversity, disagreement, disagreeableness, distance, and all the dissing that is part of growing up. You don’t tug on Superglue’s cape. You don’t spit into the wind. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. And you don’t mess around with the ties that bind.
After I cried, I felt relieved. Relieved, and happy, and grateful, and maybe not fully healed, but helped, in a huge way, by expressing my feelings, expressing tears, the milk of sadness, by letting the sadness out, acknowledging and accepting it, by letting it be, by not denying it, not sucking it up and pretending that everything was OK. Because everything was NOT OK. When you are crying the way I was crying, everything is NOT OK. If you insist on pretending everything is OK when everything is NOT OK, you will fuck yourself up, big time, trust me. You will.
Life.
Goes.
On.
We can’t stop it.
And I don’t want to.
But we can pause.
And reflect.
And try to understand.
And get in touch with how we feel.
Feel the pain and loss.
And learn from it.
Let what we’ve been through make us strong.
Stronger.
Turn adversity to advantage.
Let who we have been shape who we are.
And move forward.
Because it’s important to like who you are—to love who you are.
To love yourself.
Even when you’re crying your guts out.
Because if you can’t love yourself when you’re crying your guts out, when the hell can you love yourself?
Read more on Families.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
Amy, Thank you so much for your comment. Sharing has become a habit with me, and having started, there seems to be no way of going back. I am honored that you intend to use my piece in your counseling practice, and I hope your clients will find healing and solace in it. I am hard at work on the novel, excerpts of which are being serialized in my local online newspaper, Westport HamletHub. And thank you for your kind wishes – may you too, continue to be blessed.
Tom~
What an amazingly deeply felt article. I am extremeley appreciative that you were willing to share your very raw emotions of life with all of us. I will keep your article bookmarked for use in my future spiritual counseling practice. May your adventure writing your novel be filled with many positive, exciting twists and turns and may the rest of your journey find you happiness, healing, and contentment.
Helen, Thank you. Being able to handle our emotions, knowing how and when to release instead of just how to suppress, does make us ready to engage in an emotionally connected relationship. There is a freedom in being able to manage oneself that gives us the space to accept another’s feelings and respond to them compassionately, from the heart as opposed to from the ego.
Beautiful article for men and women!
One of the sexist and most appealing attributes a man has is his ability to share his emotions. Once he can do that, he’s ready to embark on a relationship as a friend and partner who’ll be there through the good times and bad on a level that goes beyond physical. .
I plan to share your reflections with my husband, who lost his father a different way, through absentia. The excuse for never being there was the war–well, several wars, actually, to the extent that my husband’s baby sister thought that her dad was Santa Claus because she and the rest of the family only saw him at Christmastime. Living in a military town as a boy, my husband feared visits from anyone in uniform who might be delivering bad news of a father’s death. When, at age 9, he learned that his parents were divorcing one another, it was a… Read more »
Holly, Thank you for sharing my post with your husband. I can feel the pain of his loss through your words, and I hope he is able to release some of his hurt. We can either hold it as anger or release it as forgiveness. Knowing we are loved and wanted is so important, and if we didn’t get it as a child, we crave it all the more as adults, while at the same time believing we may not be worthy of it. Your husband is fortunate to have you, and I wish you both the best.
Wow! This is probably the best blog I have read in 2012.
It is real, and I can relate. My father died when I was four. I visited his grave three days ago, on his birthday.
Crying is being real and Thomas is being profoundly authentic in this blog.
Thanks.
Thank you, Chris! That is high praise, considering your reading list, and I am humbled by it. And it means a great deal to hear it from one who has suffered the same loss. I have not been to my father’s burial place in many, many years, as it’s in the midwest and I live on the east coast. But I think, on one of my next visits home, I will take my sons there. Thank you for inspiring me to do that.
Tom, What a beautiful post. Sharing this is so important. Yes, if we don’t feel those feelings that are here already, we just make ourselves sick. Grief is intelligent. It knows how to move us and when we follow its lead, it will move us to where we can be with what is here with acceptance.
I have a sense your words are going to be balm for many.
Thank you. Julie
Julie, Thank you. It is true that holding grief and other unpleasant feelings in makes us feel sick. I felt a huge release when crying and another when I wrote the piece. I love your line, grief is intelligent. It does know where we need to go. We resist it at our own peril and follow it back to a restoration of balance. I do hope what I’ve written here will soothe others – that is both my wish and my prayer.
Hey Tom ~ That helped me as much as I imagine it will help a lot of men. Some of us learn how to stuff our feelings so well as children that we wind up having a hard time expressing ourselves as adults. So.. as a woman.. even I’m learning how to give myself permission to cry and not feel bad for having done it. You’re right when you say.. pretending everything is okay will eventually f ** k us up. And I love your ~ neuphemism ~ exxing. I have two myself.. and the most recent.. father of my… Read more »
Robin, I am very glad my words helped you. It is true that many of us are taught not to express ourselves. The virtue of stoicism is misunderstood. It is not about holding in the water. It is about not letting the water sink you. Pretending makes it worse in the long run, because the pain always comes back to bite and gets magnified by inattention. I am sorry for the loss of your father – a hard blow at any age and for your other trials. My cry helped me, and yours will help you when find the time… Read more »
Powerful stuff. I think you have done some great internal work. Thanks for sharing it as it’s an awesome example of getting our past and emotions in a proper place.
James, Thank you. The work was not easy and has taken a long time and has but has proven well worth the effort. Loss invevitably shapes us, but we do not have to let it define us or hold us back.