How often do you see someone crying in public? A stranger in tears? Can you recall the last time you saw someone you didn't know consumed by sadness? I can. I was in the hospital visiting my husband, who unfortunately spent much of his last year alive in and out of hospitals. I was riding the elevator down from the fourth floor and it stopped at the third floor and in entered two people. I can't really tell you what they looked like and for once it's not because my introverted nature keeps me from giving anyone more than a quick glance and often a small smile before I look away. It's only polite not to really look at others, right? Not too long a look anyways. When the two people entered the elevator they were holding onto each other and crying, bitterly crying in such a way you knew whatever reason they'd come to be in the hospital was far from a good one. My heart broke for them. I wanted so badly to offer some kind of solace, a single word, a well-meaning gesture that would let them know I understood, that my heart ached for their pain even though I was a complete stranger to them and knew nothing of their circumstances. Everyone knows that an elevator ride isn't very long, so those few moments I had to wrestle with my inability to breech the barrier of my own natural anxieties were quite long in my memory. The elevator doors opened and they looked at me, as elevator occupants were known to do to decide who was exiting first, and their eyes were filled with their pain and all I could offer was my own aching glance as I gestured for them to go, and under my breath I whispered, "I'm sorry." And I was sorry for whatever it was that caused them such pain that they couldn't put on their society face of stoicism. You know that face, I know you do. We wear that face - you and I. We wear it all the time. That face hides our sorrows, our heart aches, our griefs because to let all that show would disturb the normal way of things.
Why am I bringing up now? You know why. I shed that stoic façade more than once in the last almost two months… two months, how is that possible! It is, it's more than possible it's an indisputable fact that in a little over a day as of the time of this writing, it will be two months since Jerry… died.
Today I couldn't keep that façade in place, it slipped. It slipped when I was out in a very public, somewhat busy airport. My daughter who had been with me since April 11, was leaving for her home. JoAnna lives in Tennessee and back in early April she'd asked to come visit for a month or so. Jerry and I welcomed her visit, he was newly home from rehab March 27th and JoAnna would be a help as she always was when she visited.
Of course that month or so was extended when tragedy struck our lives so brutally. Matthew and I felt so blessed that God had given JoAnna time with her father, that she wasn't in Tennessee when he passed, and JoAnna felt blessed as well. It's those blessings you cling to when the pain threatens to strip all the good away.
Today, JoAnna's leaving was inevitable. I couldn't keep her any longer, I had to let her go back to her life, her family, her other loved ones- they needed and wanted her, missing her so incredibly much. I couldn't keep her and my heart knew I had to endure the loss of her, a loss not at all of the kind death brings, but a loss nonetheless.
The façade slipped and my tears came and as I walked away from her, leaving her to the journey home that she could only take alone, I saw the strangers looks through my tears, and my grief (YES, it was grief!) and I didn't care. You don't care, your pain doesn't allow you to care that others are there, it's too all consuming.
Airports, hospitals, these are places tears are seen from time to time- and if you don't work in those places you rarely see them there, but you may have during your life just as I have in mine. The tears of our humanity. The tears of our raw pain twisting our features into masks that others don't really want to see and not from callousness. I can't believe it would be from callousness. It has to be that they, like me, hurt when they see others hurting. It has to be they don't want to witness the heart agony on another's face because it reminds them of the pain they too can feel, and they don't want that pain, no one wants that pain.
Maybe you're the sort of person who can react much differently than I have. Perhaps you are of the kind who can enter another's grief, a stranger's grief unbidden to offer more than a commiserative, aching glance and a silent 'sorry'. Truthfully, in my recent moments of public displays of heartache, pain, and grief, I'm not sure I'd want any strangers intruding. In those moments all that consumes me is that agony and a desire to go where I can even more freely cry out my heart pain that is all I seek, maybe it's all any grief grasped person seeks when they are caught out in public with their pain exposed, their vulnerability known, their emotions unmasked.
I don't have the answers, right now I have the pain. God will see me through my season of pain, in Him I trust. He has every single tear of mine in a bottle.
Psa_56:8 Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?
*
To everything there is a season and a time…
…a time to die, to weep, to mourn…
Ecc 3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
Ecc 3:2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
Ecc 3:3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
Ecc 3:4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
Ecc 3:5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
Ecc 3:6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
Ecc 3:7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
Ecc 3:8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment