2008.02.24 Grieving, as an Olympic event

Or, maybe not so much.

I don't know. It's hard to really judge. I've always been one of those overly sensitive types, awash with deep emotion that I can't hide. And this grief is dredging up a dogged furrow through my life, as I drag my heavy heart through the course of my usual routines. I've never been more sad.

The hardest part right now seems to be the very real worry of spontaneously losing of my composure at any given moment. It's insidious. Something triggers a memory that invokes my father, and the sadness wells up inside me. Vanity flags a worry about publicly displaying weakness, to which the typical response is to think, "When have I cared that much about what anybody else thinks? Let the sadness OUT." But my dad didn't often display his pain, and I don't think it was just vanity. I think he did it to spare other people discomfort and worry.

And, just like that, I'm transported back to being a sensitive little kid, crying. Crying in front of my dad, because I can't help it. And knowing that he didn't cry much, though not knowing why, and feeling like I was letting him down by not being tougher. Or something similarly resilient, that didn't require me to have tears running down my cheeks if I didn't want to. But then looking up at him, shame making my tears all the more bitter, I could see in his eyes that he didn't regret my tears at all. That he loved me even with my cheeks sodden with a lack of manly resolve. It haunted me, knowing that he loved me, but not really understanding why.

Later in life, I grew to appreciate my tears. And I found a sense of personal satisfaction in not letting them prevent me from doing anything, regarding them as just honest emotional depth. This was after long years of being teased and tormented for being a crybaby, it's true. But the simple truth that presented itself was that people who cared about me never regretted my quiet unobtrusive tears, and anyone who saw them only as a sign of weakness weren't generally people worth worrying about.

I had feared that my sadness was bottomless, and that the crying would turn into a perpetual-motion mechanism for pumping out the same sadness forever and ever. The kind of eternal misery usually reserved for Greek tragedies involving demigods.

Well, I don't know whether the sadness is bottomless or not, and the crying is certainly ongoing. But there's an element of tribute to it besides just suffering. The depth of my sadness is merely proportionate to the significance my father had for me, and I do not wish to diminish that. So dad, this tear's for you.