A Terrible Winter
The night before the nation’s finest neurologists were to present their diagnosis of my dad, I read to him the Register’s offseason reporting on the Red Sox.
I wouldn’t say I was fresh for that morning meeting, but I was ready. The news would be dire, something I had known for a while. Death is obvious, we just love a little too hard to see it. We should be lucky it’s that way.
I did not know that toll I would pay for how I behaved during this meeting, but it was costly.
Keeping Vigil
Yale-New Haven keeps rooms specifically designed to give a family some privacy while the unimaginable stalks reality into submission. In it were my mother, her daughters, my aunt and uncle and myself, along with a handful of specialists.
The lead one, displaying EKG scans on the table like designs for a remodeled kitchen, would soon prove to have the touch of a porcupine. As he began to speak his phone went off; a natural occurrence for the profession, I’m sure.
It was unacceptable still. My mind was made up during the second interruption. If it happened again, I promised this doctor he would end up in the same bed my father was in.
I told him that. Verbatim. In the midst of a third phone call my uncle, ever at the ready, grabbed my adolescent right arm before it could turn me into a prophet.
My Oldest Sister
Consequently, I was escorted out of the meeting. While trudging towards the smell of microwaved egg sandwiches, I veered away down some empty hallway. Despite my fury, I needed to cry. I hadn’t done so in front of my family in about a month.
During one of our first visits, seemingly every bell and whistle in my Dad’s room went off simultaneously; a cacophony as deafening as it was haunting. Thinking this was his end, I held my mother and sisters in my arms. Not a tear.
He survived a while longer, long enough for more breakdowns and more scares. They were expected. At the kitchen counter with my mom, not a tear. In the bridge connecting the hospital to the parking lot, not a tear.
I was likely protecting my own vulnerability, but not after I had repurposed it for a greater cause, like appearing strong for my own, my kin. What a foolish game, but after all, I was only a boy.
This time, however, my sister chased after me, albeit silenced by the lack of applicable words. She recalled a nearby room, one for grieving families. It was in there where I cried, finally, draining each drop inside of a basin once overflowing.
From there they formed a river, gradually eroding the fortifications I had erected. Despite being a foot taller and God knows how many pounds less than me, I was cradled. I sobbed for over a half hour, until my head hurt from dehydration.
The Great Equalizer
To my knowledge, which is severely limited, humans are the only animal that can cry. Some argue it sends a social-signal to seek help. Others suggest, perhaps literally, that it flushes out stress hormones when one is feeling overwhelmed.
My intuition tells a different story, one with tears as a repellent. They activate boogers, as if crying-face needed to be uglier.
Then the body shrinks, pathetically. Words eke out through a stammer, after crawling upwards through a hunched esophagus. It is draining. It is draining. What remains is hardly anything to constitute the word “What” at all.
Crying thereby becomes humanity’s great equalizer. There exists no hierarchy among Mankind when one of its members wails in the midst of sobbing, begging for some change that will never arrive.
It is an admission of imperfection; a glimpse behind Oz’s curtain. The gilded pillars that once upheld the social facade du jour have crumbled, leaving you to wallow in ruins both embarrassing and low.
And everybody cries. Even gods. Even Jesus.
John 11:35
The shortest verse in the Bible reads plainly, “Jesus wept.” He did so upon seeing the emotional fallout after the death of Lazarus, whom He went on to resurrect.
Anyone who knows me well understands I’m not convincing you to believe in Jesus — there is more evidence he was a con man than a messiah, which justifies the very word faith as well as my jealousy for those who have it.
To depict Jesus crying, however, is to humanize God. Choosing to cry is choosing us, and if it wasn’t His choice then it was a natural response, meaning even God can’t shake this singularly human oddity. Which is why it exists, perhaps.
Our busy world constantly flashes pathways not towards merely perfection, but towards escaping the confines of humanity altogether.
Hair is bought, skin tightened with chemicals and aging seemingly reversed. We’ve outsourced thinking to AI, which may be better at it. The number of billionaires openly talking about death as obstacle and not eventuality is cause for alarm.
Every time someone cries, every time I cry, we’re signaling we still want to be one of you, one of us. All the phony fronts of success and shit-togetherness put forward have been melted away in a puddle where only flaws remain. That’s crying. That’s human.
For the month my father was dying, I resisted. I felt that what was best for my family was to be seen as a body and mind untouched by the fire to my life that circumstances had set ablaze.
In doing so I misdiagnosed what they needed most, which was to know I was down in this hellish torment with them. They didn’t need my fabricated strength, but the confirmation that it is wholly unnecessary when braving seismic loss.
Indeed, we needed togetherness, to grieve as one. I prevented that, through the foolhardy endeavor known as adolescent manhood. I don’t beat myself up over it too much. I’m still learning how to become a good man, without one to show me how.
But in a sentence I can’t believe I’m actually writing, I should have cried more when my Dad died.
With my family, as well. Because that’s what real men do. They cry, unashamed and unencumbered by the traditions of masculinity deposited onto us by dead men who aren’t around to witness the consequences of their ego trips.
And ego trips, according to Little Brother, is when you lose your luggage. I plan on traveling the distance with my loved ones.
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Previously Published on substack
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