FEELINGS

                                                           

I was reading some birthday greetings, from my family, off my phone a while back and out loud to a friend that was with me. My voice started to crack as I read them and my friend said, “Don’t cry.” I stopped reading them out loud and finished reading them to myself. At first I was somewhat ashamed that I had lost my composure that easily but later I thought “no, you know what? I’ll cry if I want to.” As well meaning as my friends comment was, I didn’t want to suppress those emotions. I spent too much of my life doing just that. Maybe what my friend meant was simply, “don’t cry here” and maybe my friend was just saying get a grip on yourself. I guess I’ll never know but what I do know is someday, someplace, I’ll be made proud again-- and I’ll cry again.

As I think over my life and all of the trials and tribulations I have been through, proud times, happy times and sad times, patriotic times and days of utter chaos, I often think maybe I didn’t cry enough in the past. There was a time in my life when I suppressed every notion of crying and a time when I felt it wasn’t a manly thing to do. It was a time when I viewed it as a weakness and indicative of someone who was not in control of themselves. It was a time when I felt that only women cried and men swore instead. Now with the wisdom of age on my side, I know better. Charles Dickenson said in Great Expectations: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears. For they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth-- overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried than before---more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

Old age brings us some big changes in our lives and I’m not just talking about physically but emotionally as well. Just as our bodies become frailer and fail us and are harder to control, so it is with our good emotions like happiness, pride, love and yes even sadness. They seem to lay just under the surface sometimes and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to bring them to the surface. At the same time those bad emotions that cursed us for so long like anger, envy and jealously and got us in so much trouble in life’s past seem to temper and soften and not get in the way so often anymore. With sad crying however there comes a time when you want to weep and be comforted because you’re tired of always trying to be strong. Carl Sandburg said, “Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time and yes—sometimes you weep,”

Those tears I spoke of at the start of this essay were tears of pride and love. Happy tears you earned the right to shed because you loved somebody and they just loved you back. But tears of sadness are all to often shed today. Sadness because we lost someone we loved to sickness or death. Sadness because were frustrated with family problems or financial problems. Sadness over a world that seems so far out of sync with our values and beliefs and we feel so powerless to do anything about it. Yes, it’s so ironic that the tears come easy when we are babes and just entering the world and then here they come again at the other end of life when we are old and growing closer to the end.