A single tear
31 January 2008 
I don’t usually cry when I’m sad. I cry in rage, in frustration, in stress, but not in sorrow.
I dislike funerals, mostly for that reason. Everyone else cries, and I feel like I should join in and attempt to muffle sobs that I don’t have. Instead I end up standing alone in my silent grief, hoping that people don’t notice my lack of visible emotion.
I expected the same today, especially since my grandfather’s death wasn’t particularly unexpected or painful. And then my dad walked up to the podium. He and I are very much alike, we’re quiet readers, we’re observers, and we rely more on reason than emotion in most matters. And although he didn’t cry when he reflected on the times he had with his father and how he reacted to his death, his story did prompt a single tear to form in the corner of my eye. It slid halfway down my face before it dried, leaving only a thin line of salt.
He said he didn’t expect much sorrow, because he knew it was his dad’s time to pass on and begin his life beyond this world. It was logical and it made sense to him.
“I was there with him when he took his last breath, I felt his pulse slow to a stop, and I was relieved,” he said, “because his pain and suffering in this world was over.”
Yet the next morning, he felt a spring of emotion flow up from within and he began crying uncontrollably, not being able to pinpoint why, he explained.
Later he realized that it wasn’t sorrow or anger that caused his unexpected swell of feeling, it was a realization of the bond he had with his father, something that he could not feel keenly enough until after his father had left this life. Now, he said, he welcomes the tears when they come because he knows it’s a sign of the love he and his father shared.
Something about his story touched me in a way that no hymn, memory or photograph ever could. I cried at the funeral, but I don’t think it was sorrow that brought on the emotion. If my dad’s fountain of grief realized the love he had built up in his 47 years, my single tear realized a glimpse of the bond I share with him.
Love and Death
29 January 2008 
This weekend was one of those times that makes a person sit back and think. In a slightly ironic circle, the love of my life re-entered and then my grandfather exited in a single breath.
I find myself feeling helpless. After all, I pushed Tom away because I thought it was best, even though it was against my instinct and my heart. And yet something overuled my foolish reason and sent me back to him.
And death — admidst all of its gravity, it has an aspect to it that is light, like a fresh breeze whooshing through a still night. It moves free of everything around it, but nothing is free from it. In a single breath it can knock off a respectable gentleman’s hat, touch the drafts of a biography and make the apers fly up toward the clouds, the stories disperse across the sky.
And so, with a shove from reason and a breeze of the ephermeral, I’m willing to step wherever my instinct takes me this time.
