Once upon a time, I was great at crying. In my childhood and through much of my early adulthood I found that many incidents in my life which provoked significant pain or grief could be unleashed and expelled from my body quite effectively; with a great deluge of tears. As anyone else who is a great cryer knows, it can be a sublime experience, if a little awkward in the presence of other people.
Crying, I think, is usually associated with negative emotions. So, it tends to be shunned, and thought of as something to be avoided if possible. But, in my opinion, it is an invaluable tool for the expulsion of negative emotion and is an essential part of moving past surging sensations of pain or guilt or fear, or whatever happened to trigger them.
That is, rather than retaining such a reservoir of ill-feeling for future frustration or pain—where it will still find a way out, only in a form or manner which may be even more unpleasant—that pain might at least in part be expunged. It is, and has been, keenly evident to me that many of the men I have known—many, but not all—have been hopelessly inadequate when it came to a good cathartic bawl.
Sometimes, there’s a very, very good reason to be upset. Image: Universal Pictures
Perhaps because of its association with vulnerability and, therefore, weakness, many boys are discouraged from crying. Which is an incredible shame. Certainly, there are times or situations when it can be useful to avoid crying, and maintain a sense of dignity and aplomb when others around you are losing their shit. Yet, that temporary usefulness quickly fades as the need to banish various poisonous emotions becomes more pressing. Which it inevitably does, inversely proportional to the inherent value of whatever that stone-faced demeanour briefly offered. In short, it might be handy to be able to stem the flow in the moment but there’s a longer-term price to be paid if it isn’t dealt with.
I don’t say this as someone who, for example, cries a great deal and is seeking validation for something others might see as a flaw, nor to be lionised for some kind of insight into the value of harnessing the power of strong emotions. On the contrary, I feel as though I have quite a unique perspective on the matter.
For a little longer than a decade, I’ve been unable to cry at all. Not quite entirely—there have been a few absolutely thunderous explosions of grief over that time; the snotty-nosed, jagged-inhaling type—but they have become extremely difficult to manufacture. And I say ‘manufacture’ because I miss the ease with which I was once able to become tearful and expel some of the toxicity in the emotional baggage I was carrying. I don’t feel as though the steely reserve that sees me through funerals and big arguments is worth the lingering sense that I have lost the ability to exile the actual pain which irritatingly lingers afterwards. No tears; no catharsis; no moving on.
The death of an immediate family member affects different people in different ways. Siblings and children within the same family might have radically different approaches to an event which, depending on one’s perspective and values and the specifics of the relationship involved, can seem highly inappropriate or downright outrageous in some contexts. Often, the various participants’ vulnerabilities and emotional needs are put on display, or even broadcast far and wide, or perhaps they shrink from view.
It can be difficult for those who deploy one type of response to understand someone deploying a different response. Some appear as selfish, attention-seeking engines of noise with little respect or regard for the more internalised sensibilities of others. Others appear downright stone-hearted, automatons who clearly didn’t care about the deceased because they haven’t cried at all. Personalities often become exaggerated in such situations as people open up to express their grief, or shut down to ruminate. My own experience of this phenomenon was not as a child or sibling but one step removed, as the partner of a grieving daughter.
Offering unconditional support to another person while they are working through that process of fear, anxiety and terror, and ultimately inconsolable grief, especially if the connection with the deceased is particularly strong, can be a truly torturous proposition. While I cannot hope to reasonably compare my experience with that of my then partner—whose suffering was actually existential in nature—there is a special kind of pain reserved for those who are extremely close to, but not as immediately affected by, the death of someone incredibly important. Such an experience is rendered and understood through the suffering of the person one loves the most, rather than by the loss of the actual person whose death (or imminent demise) is generating the suffering in the first place.
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My own father, who thankfully still lives, is a wonderful example to me for a plethora of reasons, one of which is his willingness and ability to cry. One of my earliest childhood memories was being told by my mother that my paternal grandfather had died—something I understood intellectually at the time but had no hope of understanding in its full complexity—and that my Dad would be very upset when he heard the news. Some part of me knew in that moment that this was an opportunity. I had never seen my father cry (at least, as far as I could recall; I was about five years old). I certainly possessed neither awareness nor memory of it if he had, and I was desperately curious to see what that looked like.
I can still remember vividly, as clearly as almost any adult memory I have, looking out over the window-sill of our house—something I could at that stage only achieve by standing on a couch which abutted it—when Dad came home. I watched Mum go outside and wander down the driveway, first to greet him, and then proffer her condolences as she delivered the terrible news. I’m not sure why he parked out the front that day, and not further down the driveway where I wouldn’t have been able to see, but that small detail ensured that I still to this day have a clear vision of my father becoming inconsolably upset.
When he came in (and for whatever reason my memory of this aspect is much less clear), I hid behind that same couch in the living room to listen, ensuring I was unable to be seen. I was very curious, but obviously also unsure of the specifics of such grief. Yet I knew enough to understand that it was improper of me to simply gawk at him, and so I remained carefully hidden in the tiny gap behind the couch which my parents may not have even known I could still fit into. To this day, I have no idea if they even knew I was there. But there I remained, for what seems in hindsight like an eternity, keeping quiet, breathing slowly and carefully, in that cramped little spot where I just listened.
The details of the subsequent conversation are lost to me—if they ever registered at all—but the memory itself remains distinct. I will always be grateful for that small and imperfect recollection, because while it isn’t anything I have ever consciously recalled during moments of pain in my own life, it reinforced an idea about masculinity and crying which meant that becoming upset was never a source of shame for me.
Importantly, the tenderness and care my mother showed during that interaction also provided me with a key component of my own future compassion. Empathy is something I have never instinctively felt. In other words, I find putting myself in other people’s shoes to be utterly counterintuitive. When I do it, I have to make a conscious effort to do so. It takes quite a bit of effort. I have never been sure about why this is: whether I possess something of a tendency toward sociopathy (which concerned me when I was younger); or whether it is perhaps yet another aspect of the autism spectrum which further delineates me from other neurotypical people.
In a similar vein, many of my social behaviours are direct mimicries of significant interactions I have experienced in the past. Or, even simply events from movies or television which seemed effective and, once put in practice, became so. Generally speaking, I have very poor instincts about how to interact with my fellow human beings, so these kinds of examples were incredibly valuable. It is extraordinarily difficult for me, most of the time, to adequately or appropriately express my feelings. Brooding and frustration manifest far too easily for my liking, for example. Having a living example to recall—that is, being able to rely on the knowledge that behaving in this specific fashion is the right thing to do, even though I can’t really tell if it is working or not—is critical for me, as I am sure it is for many other people.
So, when the man who would, post-mortem, become my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer—and was given less than five years to live, then less than two, then just the one—I knew how to behave when consoling his daughter. What I remained unaware of was how such consolation might be appropriate for her, but not necessarily always for myself. Over the space of the six cruellest months of my existence—not to mention hers—this poor man was slowly wrung out, leeched of strength and, finally, suffocated by the cancer which mercilessly desiccated and exhausted him in due time, until he was so frail that there was barely any weight left to touch or hold of him.
There are, inevitably, particular moments along such a journey which indelibly carve themselves into one’s memory and stay there. They are lessons of a sort, but not nearly so beneficial as courageous examples of emotional release.
This kind of cancer, of the oesophageal variety, is (or was, in 2009) the kind which prompts doctors of all stripes to pause a moment, and offer their immediate condolences. It’s not the kind where they begin to list insights into recovery rates or new technology or treatment. It’s not the ‘hope’ kind. It’s the ‘apology of inevitability’ kind of cancer.
The first time you hear a prognosis such as “this person you care about so much has five years to live”, it immediately brings a new kind of perspective into view. We instinctually view life as an uncoiling, amorphous tangle of potential and hope and anxiety and frustration and endless possibility. When it suddenly wrenches tight, and gets snipped off at some arbitrary point, everything our culture tells us about the inexorable and endless march of time becomes clogged, muffled; confusion reigns.
A mark of sudden urgency is scorched, like a burn or brand, upon the mind; a whole plethora of ideas and predictions suddenly become insensitively divided between ‘before death’ and ‘after death’ where previously they had always simply been “maybe” or “one day”. Like marriage or children, a particular achievement, or the kind of lifestyle and security which must bring a parent a true sense of contentment as they realise their child will live a good life even without their assistance. A voice whispers, “will this person live to see such an outcome, even if you got on to it straight away?” Sometimes, it can be hard enough to dream of success, to feed ambition, to fulfil creative energies, and hope that one day it will come to fruition. But what if… what if even if those dreams came true, there’s no chance of hearing, “I’m proud of you” from someone who matters most?
What if, having come to terms with the shortness of five precious years, and the frankly shocking consideration of how few things might be achieved or enjoyed in that time, that in the end it is finished in five months? As though the idea of an hour becomes mere minutes, left to contemplate, think, soak up the essence of a person before their entire being just… drifts away.
There are moments, such as when a person is so flush with opioids that the drugs literally put all action on pause and a meal is interrupted for minutes at a time with a blank stare, a spoon hovering almost comically near the mouth, which yawns in anticipation. Yet there’s nothing funny about it because the hesitation marries with the general lack of focus, the ever-increasing disorientation and memory loss, and moments of outright visual or auditory hallucination. These horrid things which manifest as reminders of the brain’s very precise processes and how easily they can be corrupted even as a means of easing pain. A sharp reminder that pain is ultimately just packaged stimuli, like consciousness itself and our entire experience of existence.
There are moments, when the cancer is already well advanced toward its purpose, and a room begins to smell of decay and imminent death. While other more pungent odours might be more immediately offensive there are none quite so repellent; the soft stink of it lurks like a mighty shadow looming and ever-threatening, or like some snarling predator standing over its still-twitching kill, unhurried and luxuriating in the coming feast. A truly rancid smell which fulfils its reason for existence, as a literal herald of death.
Some memories teach their lesson with a brutality appropriate to the nature of life itself. They are seared rather than etched upon the soul, and can instigate consideration of concepts such as at which precise point a human consciousness can no longer really be defined as a ‘person’ or ‘personality’, and has simply become the trembling motor of a husk that is already on its way toward curling and shrivelling into nothing. Or at what point it becomes cruel to hope that a fellow human continues living any longer, because that hope only exists to ease your own guilt or to delay a terrible finality. That such hope is not for them, for whom the remainder of their reality involves pushing a Sisyphean boulder of increasing agony further and further up a mountain they can never hope to crest and have since ceased to comprehend, let alone care about. Tragically, how soon is too soon to hope that the end comes quickly, rather than slowly, despite the obvious and desperate hope of those you love to extend even a tortured life to its furthest possible extent.
Some memories take hold, and don’t ever let go. It is quite a thing to lift a body that is almost a corpse, no longer able to move under its own power, utterly helpless and literally upon the verge of death, a naked and taut-skinned skeleton of a person with barely any consciousness left but still enough dim dignity to cover their genitals as they are moved and yet not quite enough to close their ever-gaping jaw. It is quite a thing to lift that same body again, a little lighter and without any of the feeble energy or life that it had barely clung to the day before. Silent, strangely unfamiliar; there is something about the way a human face loses some aspect of its self the moment that life leaves it, and becomes subtly different. The phrase ‘deathly still’ takes on a more nuanced meaning.
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Sometimes, though, the grinding hurt of the process itself is the easy part. All the physical manifestations: the slow rotting of organs and the visible pain and the degeneration of the psyche, there is an immediacy, a constancy and an observable predictability to it all which retains a connection to the actual world. Even the funeral is a physical event, where the reassurance and comfort of other people is palpable. A coffin is hard-lacquered and the flowers smell sweet.
What comes after is a challenge on a psychological level with no rival, in my experience. My life-long internal conflict has involved bitter, losing struggles with depression and also with raging anger and the excessive restraint or cyclical binge-and-purgation of a mind so desperate to control something—anything—that it resorts to the very flesh which it inhabits. Yet none of these things is the equal of that dark hissing void which consumes everything in its vicinity, that lack which stands beside and apart from true grief, perhaps seeking a solid thing to bring into its orbit and finally break apart and utterly obliterate.
It can take years to recover. Not two, not five, but not quite ten and yet even at that point there is still a psychic anchor dangling from the most sensitive part of the mind, which snags on things and gives a good, hard wrench from time to time to provide a reminder of its presence. It takes a hardening of the heart to survive such a trial of endurance. There is no glory in it, nothing affirmative you might summarise as a meme in flowing text over a picture of a fucking beach or sunset; it’s just boring old pain. The entire process becomes nothing more or less than what it is: an endless, trivial slog. It is a journey deadened and devoid of the full range of emotional sensibility. It is as though the soul has become numbed, gone to sleep like an arm in the middle of the night, yet there is no moment of panicked awakening whereupon the blood flow is restored. It simply presses, on and on and on and on and on. Aching, for what feels like forever.
In time, to survive and persist in a world that lurches on relentlessly, taking no pause to consider what it has lost (because it loses such things every minute of every day), the heart needs to be sewn up quick. It is an ugly, temporary fix. As I write this, I can feel powerful emotions surging through me, pushing and shoving and trying to force their way out. But despite my best efforts, I can no longer summon the sadness needed to actually expel those feelings. I am inert. That hasty stitch has never really healed those wounds but has just grown a scar across the memories which, once upon a time, let me cry freely. It is a wound whose insidious nature, given enough time to have its way, even eviscerated our marriage.
There is another longer, quieter story there to tell. About how this pain lurked across an entire decade, a shadow and blight to bring a miserable end to something once genuinely wonderful. Love, too, forgotten in a quagmire of grief, and loss. But that is a story for another time.
Occasionally, I get close to crying. Until very recently it was only on behalf of the wonderful human who was once my wife that the urge became the strongest. That I might nearly choke as my throat constricted and some brief tears escaped the flailing of my garrotted grief. I would think of her, consider her pain, and the tears would occasionally arrive; it’s how I fooled myself into release. It would be watching her, doing something as mundane as editing a photograph, or tooling some kind of sound design with a skill I myself barely understood, when I would realise that these incredible things she has seen and done since he died, can never be acknowledged by him.
He is proud of his daughter. He is so proud. A part of me wanted to think—in that foolish, romantic way which bears no relation to actuality—that from time to time he might have seen my wife through my eyes, and be filled with the same sense of overwhelming wonder that I felt for her, swelling full with pride. That my memory-version of him, some metaphysical residue of his existence which resides only in my mind, might transcend the utter waste of his loss, and somehow come to understand and appreciate what an amazing potential his daughter fulfilled. That the potential of the person she always has been would be not just reached but exceeded; she would spread her glorious wings, and fly the way he always hoped and imagined.
And then, just sometimes, I could bring myself to cry.