No Day Without Tears?

          I cried today. Nothing new. As a matter of fact, they are the same old tears I have been crying for months. A friend asked me today how much I have been crying lately. Seemed curious to think about it that way, the quantity of tears was really not what she wanted to know. It might have been more along the lines of the duration of the moments when tears visit, in terms of minutes or hours, that she was trying to examine. It wasn't a difficult question but it wasn't an easy answer. 
       In the beginning of Grief, when tears were always at the ready, I made a comment about being done with crying. I said I'd be glad of a day without tears, thinking that the process of expressing my Grief, not the actual Grief itself, was wearing me out. My friend told me then that it would be a very long time before I had a tear-free day. How long can it be?, I thought. A week or a month? Seems like I will never know. So far, more than four months in, there is not a day without tears. 


       Do you want the truth? They are a welcome friend now, these salty and slippery drops. I'm not sure who I would be without those tears. When I came home from the hospital without my son I had not cried nearly enough. The shock was still consoling me and when it wore off, the protective bubble dissolving around me, the storm of tears began. Over that first week the tears would come with no control; I would wake to sneaky pools of them under my baggy eyes, leaving them to sit and evaporate while I closed my eyes again, trying to ignore the reality of the real world. The salt crystals that remained were crunchy and strange under my fingers, a mini-spa treatment scrubbing away the skin, buffing the gray and wan away. 
       I thought for a bit that being strong would mean no tears.I would fight them back, choking myself up for hours, only to need a release later. In public, I would blot my cheeks with tissue, quickly catching a drip before it rolled past my lashes. Soon enough I learned that those tissues don't help. They left my skin raw and falsely pink, chapped and unfulfilled. So I started to let them run, leaving tracks on the sides of my face, droplets on a shoulder or lap, willy-nilly where they would land. I'd let them collect on my glasses, white semi-circles spattering the lenses and clouding my vision. I'd let them slide through my sinuses, becoming snot tears, leaking from my nose instead of my eyes and making me use a sleeve to stem the flow. 
       I learned a hard lesson about a month in, to never cry on my side. My tears put me to sleep one night, only to wake up hours later with a pounding headache, a hot poker of an ear infection raging behind my tympanic membrane. All those tears had backed up in my sleep, drowning my ear in bacteria and deafening me for over a month. My face was tight from tears on other days, skin stiff from tracks traced over and over, like a roadmap to my broken heart. I learned the lesson also, to not deny their call. It doesn't help to hold them at bay; those tears need release to ease that ache in my soul, the empty hole my son should fill, now filling to the brim with tears.
       I am still amazed by the Grief. Tears themselves I thought I was familiar with and I was wrong. Even now I can get an education, experiencing oddities like only one eye crying, or four ducts going all at once. The types of tears and taste of them is something new to me as well, some losing their salt and others plump with it. I catch myself at times swallowing the lump in my throat, knowing they are ready and letting them steep, thinking their flavor might be more palatable though it is never to be savored. 
       It may even be fair to say that I look forward to crying. Seems twisted to say it, that it is how I can remember my baby. In sitting with my thoughts, cultivating those tears in recollections and musings, nourishing them on photos and the few mementos we have of Griffin, I am able to enjoy time with only him. Did I ever break it down for my friend into how much I have been crying? Not exactly. There is no measure I can compare this with...a gallon or only a few cups? Ten minutes per day as an average or a few hours a week? I feel it is enough to do justice to our loss and not too much to hold me back from my girls. There is no moat surrounding me any longer, we can safely say. Probably seems more like a spongy soaked swamp. 


If you are innterested, here is an article on the different types and look of tears:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-microscopic-structures-of-dried-human-tears-180947766/?no-ist

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