TEARS ARE HEAVEN ON EARTH

When someone you loves passes away, there is just nothing. 

Nothing is all around you.

Nothing is inside you.

Your heart is nothing.

Tears are all there is. 

If you are the person who suffers grief without tears, just wait. The tears will come at some other time.
If you are like some of us, the tears started before your loved one even died. After he died. Still, to this day. 

All my life I have HATED crying. I hate it when others do it. I most especially hated it when I could feel tears pricking my own eyelids. Usually I would use my allergies as a momentary excuse. Sometimes I would just turn away, quickly rub my eyes, sniff and turn back. As a child I felt that it was a sign of weakness and that not crying was smart and bold: that was the child I wanted to be and for the most part, was. 

The trouble with not crying is that you become hardened to sadness and start treating it like an every day occurrence. Ho hum. And then before you know it, it affects your perception of joy as well: that also becomes something of an everyday (mediocre) experience. Ho hum again. WRONG!!!! This is so wrong and I was so wrong to allow my emotional IQ to dip so dangerously low in those past years. 

When Bob, my husband, started his decline of health, neither of us cried. We were both pretty "strong" about it and we were fatalistic. It would happen. We would just put it off as long as we could. His leitmotif was always "quality over quantity" and he made sure his specialist understood his particular requirements about DNR (do not resuscitate). He only wanted to be 'brought back' if he could go back to the same quality of life but not if his quality of life would be even more compromised. I understood but I didn't buy into that attitude. I set my emotions aside, put them on a shelf someplace, and just soldiered on doing what we normally did. Living the best we could. 

As many do, he was hospitalized (again), caught pneumonia and died. I cried every night during his many hospitalizations during the previous two years. I was advised to practise "anticipatory grief" by imagining how things would be when he eventually succumbed. That was such stupid advice: I wish I had never heard it. 

I cried many nights with that moronic practice. I never really thought of the extreme loneliness but I did think of the horrors concomitant with his physical act of dying. I imagined how he would look as a corpse. (In the eventuality of truth, I never saw his dead body--I could not bear to do so.) His death was nothing like the experience I had imagined and my responses were totally opposite to what I had imagined they might be. 

There were many months of anticipatory grief. Those tears were a complete waste of time. After the fact of Bob's actual passing, there were many more days of nonstop tears--tears so torrential that I could barely catch my breath. I would gasp and choke. Tears ran down my throat and gave me a sore throat for months afterward. I couldn't speak for crying. 

And yet I pay homage to those tears. Tears bring memories that sear your soul. Where there was nothing--no feelings, no thoughts, no ability to move--tears introduced memories like movies. They ran across the screen of my otherwise empty mind. Their bright colors usually revived me. I would get lost in those memories. I still do. 

Tears are so much more than symbolic of a lost love. Tears usher in the past and the present's vibrant moments. They reconnect images with an emotional impact.  Tears are harbingers of a rosy-hued future. In a sense, tears condense a million moments into one crystalline second. Tears elevate your energy vibrations to a higher plane where peace and a sense of calmness are overwhelming and just so beautiful.

I think they call that place heaven. 

Tears are heaven on earth.