Tears

I cried yesterday and at first didn't know why. I cried out an ordinary sadness, the grief of an ordinary loss on an ordinary day. I cried out the pain of disconnection when my love and I missed each other. I cried the grief of past hurts long gone, but still remembered. I cried the pain of unhealed wounds, of growth trying to happen, of knowing myself in a way I haven't been ready to see before. For the first time in three months I cried tears that were not about Ryan.

And then I realized that it was the first time, and of course, I cried for Ryan. Like every other marker, every first, every last, every new frame around his life and his death, the thought itself brought back the gut-wrenching loss of my son.

Even so I am comforted by a bit of ordinary life, a moment much like so many moments before. 

In Before I cried a lot as I contemplated life and loss. As Jamie and I found our way together old wounds surfaced often, ready to be noticed and perhaps healed. Sometimes he held me while I cried. Sometimes I held him as he cried. Sometimes we held each other. We cried our way through the dreams we left behind as we divorced our first spouses. We mourned the unspoken hurts of childhood, the wounds our loving parents had unknowingly inflicted, the stories we told ourselves that we see now are not the stories we wish to tell. Before, with no particular tragedy in my life, I kept kleenex close at hand and cried often.

How strange, then, that for three months I didn't cry about any of those thing. And then not strange at all. As though some unconscious part of me knew that a body can only cry so many tears, a caretaker counting each one as it fell, noting the frequency, regulating the flow of emotion. A deep and wise part covering over the other wounds as drop by drop this one unbearable pain poured out of me in floods and drips and strangled sobs. Until the flow slowed and a small reservoir collected. 

Yesterday that wise part said, "Today there are tears for other hurts. There may not be tomorrow as there were not yesterday, but today, Karen is strong enough to feel."

So I did. Another phase of grief arrived. I felt ordinary hurts and cried ordinary tears, and for a moment, touched wounds that had nothing to do with Ryan. It felt strangely normal and utterly foreign. In that taste of familiar, amidst the unimaginable life where Ryan is not with me, the pain of his loss overcame me again, and I cried for him.