Presently, my days are filled with tears.  As children, we cry easily.  Perhaps, as Shakespeare says, ‘we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools’.  Babies cry from frustration, from pain, from fear, and this is largely a vocal activity – it is crying more than weeping.  Somewhere in Gareth Malone’s book Music for the People I think he says that a baby’s cry is, as it were, designed to be intolerable.  It’s pitched in a way to pierce through all other noises, it demands attention.  It summons succour.

As we grow older the noise converts to tears.  We cry to reach out to others for help; but we weep alone and in desolation. There is something particularly terrible to find a child weeping, silent in their grief, because this suggests their life has already taught them that no-one will come.

And as we become adult, tears tend to dry up.  There is even, horribly, a suggestion that tears are ‘not manly’. Tears can catch us out:  I have stood in the vets with tears streaming down my face, telling the vet to ignore me: that I am not actually feeling distress at the death of the pet mouse,  but somehow the tears will come.  As an adult, I cried less and less:  tears become difficult and painful.  Of course, both obviously and yet unfathomably, I continued to cry in theatres.  Ralph Fiennes pouring a glass of water on stage, 3^rd September 2020;  tears fell down my face, hidden behind my face mask.  

What is the purpose of weeping?  All I know is it is something connecting our physical selves with our emotions and, somehow, that is beneficial to us.  It’s a ludicrous, undignified, ugly activity:  intense weeping means red eyes and snot and, certainly for me, a physical compression, a clenching in the stomach which doubles me over, facial grimaces and a turning away of the head.  There has been much of this recently, and it has been to express myself rather than in response to the external prompt.    

There was a phase in our marriage when I felt that I kept making my husband cry.  We weren’t arguing – we rarely argued – but if I pushed to try to understand something, to communicate more clearly and understand his feelings, then he could not speak and he wept.  I stopped: this was painful to see and it felt cruel, which I did not intend.  Hindsight now makes me question my decision to stop and to back away from those conversations;  kindness prevented me.  But kindness, ineffably well-intentioned, can divert us from other more essential things. 

The strange truth is that weeping somehow does something, it expresses something – it pushes something out – so that, after a good bout of tears, we feel … what is the word.. easier in ourselves. Nothing has changed about the circumstances, but we feel physically soothed, an emotional pressure has been eased.  These days I tend to talk about physical processes – of which I understand nothing really – that, somehow, the process has allowed some chemical balance to change (those ever useful ‘hormones’).  Which makes the whole thing devoid of meaning, while of course we persist in living as if, somehow, the experience of being a person is more than a sequence of chemical reactions.  Tears must mean something.

So to use old-fashioned words, I weep because I am heartbroken.  And it is better, I think, to be able to use those words, and I think it is better to be able to weep, than to be mute and dry-eyed.  Weeping expresses otherwise unbearable sorrow.    

On Saturday I sang at a choral workshop, learning a new Requiem Mass by Matthew Coleridge.  And in July I am going to a ‘come and sing’ Mozart Requiem.  The Lachrimosa is a movement in the Requiem so the Latin word both comes easily to mind and also brings with it scores (forgive the pun) of musical phrases – swooping, sighing, intense and lush.  ‘Lachrimosa dies illa’ – full of tears will be that day.

Somehow, weeping alleviates.  It lightens something which, otherwise, is difficult to endure. I have mentioned ‘Wayfaring’ before, and am now acutely conscious of the spacial (and physical) metaphors which inform our emotional and mental language. Only by going through the vale of tears can we, eventually, emotionally move on.   If there is cause to grieve then, like the bear hunt, it is better to go through it – you have got to go through it.  There is a time for weeping, and a time for mourning and my strange faith is that by going through those things, we will also then, in due course, find that laughter and dancing will return. 

It’s unfashionable to talk of heartbreak, I think:  more commonly we acknowledge this level of sorrow when we are bereaved.   And it is not uncommon to hear people say that they haven’t grieved properly.  For various reasons, sometimes circumstantial (there was not time) and sometimes through fear, they recognise that the time for mourning was ignored or pushed away.  But they also find the need remains, supressed: it will not go away, but remains there, taking up emotional space, blocking other feelings, heavy and resistant. 

So full of tears is this day.  I will weep for as long as I need to.  I will try not to be indulgent – I will seek a direct path through this – but I will go through it.  As – of course – Shakespeare has one of his heroines say:

 

Benedick:  Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?

Beatrice: Yea, and I will weep a while longer

Benedick: I will not desire that

Beatrice: You have no reason; I do it freely.

Much Ado about Nothing Act IV Scene i