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I am not a pretty crier. Remember that single perfect tear rolling down Demi Moore’s cheek in Ghost? Not me. My crying jags start innocently enough, when my eyes start to fill, but that’s followed by some twisted facial contortions intended to head off the inevitable. Then comes the actual sobbing, hiccups and all. Episodes end with puffy eyes and blotchy cheeks, which last for hours and make me look as if I’ve either got the world’s worst allergies or have just lost my best friend. Seriously, it’s not pretty.
This is especially unfortunate given that I cry not just at weddings and funerals but also at coffee commercials, third-grade recorder concerts, and the occasional Little League baseball game. At major league games I’ve been known to cry during the national anthem. (Also when the Mets win, but I digress.) In other words, I’m a sentimental, frequent, ugly crier.
My mother, on the other hand, was no such thing. She may not have been entirely unsentimental (although that’s open to debate), but she certainly didn’t show her feelings with tears. In my entire childhood I only saw her break down twice—once at her father’s grave and again after a certain, um, behavioral situation involving us kids (we don’t really need to go into that one). We were all shocked to see her cry at the cemetery, and I even confided in a friend about it—only to have word get back through the neighborhood to my sister, who took me to task for revealing such a dark family secret to anyone. Yes, mom had cried. It was the talk of the town.
I can only imagine what it was like for a non-crier like her to have a kid like me, who cried rather a lot. When I was in trouble, mostly, or when I was afraid I was about to land there (the sentimental angle didn’t develop until later). Crying was a sign of weakness, and her usual response was something along the lines of “look at you, a big girl like you, crying like a baby.” It didn’t help that I’d passed her in height while still in elementary school, so I did feel like an awfully big girl indeed. (Oh, and when I worked myself up into a real state, I tended to throw up while crying—which may have had something to do with her attempts to keep me from starting.)
Of course I saw her cry several times later on—when my father died, when her mother died, during those few years there when it seemed that funerals were the only times the family got together—and it never failed to rattle me. But when she began her descent into Alzheimer’s she didn’t need tears of grief any more, and she seemed to experience sentiment for what may have been the first time. She wept buckets of happy tears when her first grandchild got married, although she had no idea whose wedding it was.
Dementia seemed to make her a slightly happier person, at least for a while. Something in her life had made her build those cold walls around her heart, but I guess whatever it was melted away along with all the neurons. She was happy to see us when we visited, but she promptly forgot that we’d been there. We used to joke that the best visits were those when she needed a bathroom break, because when she came back she was delighted to see us all over again—double credit for the trip!
In the years that followed, our gallows humor gave way to grim reality. Mom was gone in all the ways any parent is eventually gone: we’d sold the house, divided up a lifetime’s worth of memorabilia, and accepted that we were now the adults in the family. But there she was: Gone but not gone. For nearly six years she rarely spoke, barely acknowledged her visitors, and showed no emotion at all. In her final year she was completely bedridden and pretty much unresponsive. The only relief in seeing her like that was that she was so unaware of it all. If you’re going to exist in such a dismal state, best not to know it.
One day I was in the car with my wife and kids and we were right near the nursing home, so I figured we would drop in. It had been a while since I’d taken the girls to see grandma, since they’d stopped bringing her any joy (and because seeing her had started to frighten them). I knew it would be a tough visit for them, but I also knew it would be quick, since she probably wouldn’t even open her eyes. I even thought it would be good for them to see what the end of life looked like. Mom wasn’t in pain, wasn’t unhappy; it was just that her life was over and we were waiting for the end.
But Mom’s eyes were open when we walked into her room, and her face lit up—that brief flash that said she knew she knew us, even if she didn’t quite know who we were. The kids hung back as I launched into my fake-cheery, too-loud greeting: Hi mom, how are you doing today? Look, we brought the girls to see you!
That’s when I saw it. For a long time I’d assumed my dear-god-please-don’t-start-crying facial contortions were mine alone, learned as a way to avoid her contempt. But there they were, as if in the mirror. Eyes filled with grief and hand held to her mouth, she turned her face away to hide the tears that had started falling. I turned to my wife in horror, both of us recognizing my face in hers, both realizing that we were witnessing something far worse than dementia. Living out your final years in a state of oblivion is bad enough—flashes of clarity in which you’re aware of your condition are the stuff of Stephen King movies.
I heard my traumatized younger daughter telling a friend about it—so much for my painless end-of-life teaching moment—but it wasn’t in the hushed tones I’d once used about mom’s cemetery breakdown. And the trauma was rightfully about her grandma, not about her mom’s tears. She’s pretty matter-of-fact about that, if a little embarrassed. This is the child who once did a second-grade classroom presentation about The Odd Life of Timothy Green, noting that it had made both of her moms cry like babies—a double outing. Yet neither revelation made us the talk of the town.
Which gives me hope, in spite of the horror. If my kids can speak candidly about grief, and shed their own tears openly and easily (which heaven knows they do), I call that progress. Both of them were adopted, so if the facial contortions are genetic they’ll be spared those too. Maybe someday when they’re a bit older we’ll watch Ghost together and I’ll get them to work on that single-tear thing. Because damn, that’s pretty.
