Grief
Tears: the Hallmark of Grief
They’re hard, they’re healthy, and they evolve over time.
Posted March 13, 2022 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- Even if you try to avoid them, grief and tears eventually catch up to you.
- Crying is healthy; repressive coping is not.
- Eventually tears become a less-frequent, less-intense part of everyday life.
Crying is the hallmark of mourning, practically shorthand for the experience. We grieve therefore we cry. Tears are the outward and spontaneous expression of a feeling too primal to fully express any other way.
Crying is so integral to mourning, some cultures hire professional mourners to attend funerals and make sure the deceased is sent off on a respectable river of tears. It's interesting to think about that, considering that even in grief support groups, people often apologize for their tears. Is there any more appropriate place to cry than in a grief support group? But tears, and vulnerability in general, make other people uncomfortable, so we try to suppress them in public. When they insist upon spilling out despite our efforts, we are embarrassed by the social faux pas.
Avoiding of the grief monster
As I mentioned before, I cried very little in the months right after my husband, Tom, died. (Except during therapy and EMDR, when I cried buckets.) I didn’t hold tears back; rather, I so effectively involuntarily suppressed them, they were not even accessible to me. This was in part because, as I’ve heard other grievers say, I was certain that if I started crying I would never stop, until my body was a dried husk. Crying felt threatening. Dangerous.
In fact, in those first months, the enormity of the grief itself was terrifying. I suppose that was part of the denial that is among Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. (Which I think of less as stages—with the linear progression that suggests—than as randomly occurring inevitabilities.) I didn’t deny Tom was gone but was so terrified of the intensity of the grief, my consciousness refused to allow it in. I imagined grief as a huge, terrible monster (resembling, in my imagination, Godzilla) lurking behind me, ready to tear me apart. I thought that once acknowledged, the grief might kill me, so for as long as I could, I refused to turn and face it.
Staying busy helped, and I stayed very, very busy. I never stopped working (fortunately I work at home, alone). I did yard work, took road trips, saw people (outdoors at a distance, since this was in the worst of the pandemic). I exhausted myself trying to outrun the grief monster.
Crying time
I don’t know when or why the crying started, but it eventually did—with a vengeance. I cried often, and hard, and I could not regulate it. The grief would start as a lump right beneath my collarbones. It would well up into my throat and refuse to be suppressed until the sobs came tearing out of me in great, painful wails. This was crying like I’d never experienced. It was intense, loud, and primal. And, I suppose, it was necessary.
Crying emotional tears (as opposed to something-is-in-my-eye tears) is good for us. It releases endorphins. And not crying when you’re sad—called repressive coping—can be bad for us in various ways, including cardiovascular health. Tears also promote attachment, empathy, and bonding behavior. Embarrassing as it feels, crying in front of others creates or strengthens bonds. We actually honor people when we trust them enough to show our pain and allow them to offer comfort—the trick is to try to be selective as to who we honor with those tears.
So finally accessing my tears was good, but also weird. I’ve never experienced anything as intense and out of control as my tears during that period of grief. Even as I sobbed, part of me split off and watched myself, thinking, “Wow. Is this real?”
It was. Very.
Many people say they feel better after a good cry, although for me it feels more like a sneeze—it builds up until it must be released. I don’t feel relief when it’s over, just tired, with residual sadness wafting around me.
Everyday tears
Eventually crying is just part of life for those of us who are grieving. The tears come at will. Sometimes we can identify a trigger, but not always. We cry in the morning when we wake up. We cry in the supermarket when we see something our loved one liked but that we no longer need to buy. We cry at songs on the radio. We cry in the car. (Often, for some reason.) I once posted about that in a Facebook support group and got lots of "amens." Crying in the car is definitely a thing. Perhaps it’s because when we’re driving on autopilot, we can let our minds wander, and when my mind wanders it usually ends up at Tom. I invariably cry on my way home from the supermarket, although I could not tell you why.
I once posted in the Facebook group that I was sitting in a liquor store parking lot sobbing, and people threw themselves at me—figuratively speaking—certain that I was an alcoholic about to go on a bender. I wasn’t; I was just there to buy a bottle for a hostess gift. So why was I crying in the liquor store parking lot? I have no idea. It just happened, as it will.
(Actually, I posted about it because “Crying in the Liquor Store Parking Lot” struck me, through my tears, as kind of funny—a bad country song lyric.)
These days, nearly two years in, I still cry, though not as often and usually not violently. Certain thoughts invariably trigger tears, so I keep those at bay as much as possible; no need to pick at scabs. And crying is even more like sneezing than before—it sneaks up on me and is usually brief, sometimes just a sob or two and done. The most important thing I’ve learned about crying is to let it move through me. I feel the buildup, let it out, get on with things. I don’t try to stop it, except in public, because that’s awkward. The tears I shed in my support group or therapy are practically Pavlovian; no matter how OK I’ve been feeling, in those venues the tears are irrepressible. I suppose it's the implicit permission granted there.
If you are new to grief and fear the tears, know that even after more than a year of crying, I am not a dried husk. Crying controlled me for a while, but no longer. Yes, I still cry. Plenty. My tears probably will never dry up completely. But I don’t want them to. Not completely. These days I think of them as liquid love.
