Whatever set me off a few months ago, the trigger shot
its bullet into the center of my heart, again. “What was it?” I wondered, as
another set of tears shook me so hard I could hardly stand up.
Was it that morning’s dream of returning to work as an
RN on an overflow floor, where no-one was available to orient me? And I dabbled
in one thing or another only to realize I hadn’t gotten an assignment and
hadn’t done any patient care or passed any meds. I realized I was there but I wasn’t
contributing anything and had forgotten how to do the job. “OK,” I thought, “unsettling
dream. The third in a row.” Was that what made me so vulnerable, the
feeling of being useless or out of sync with the world?
Perhaps it was the looking in my mirror and seeing the
sores on my face left over from a dermatologist’s liquid nitrogen gun. Or maybe
it was that I felt defeated about dieting again or that no one had returned my
calls for two days or. . . or . . . or . . .
Suffice it to say I searched all the daily
astrological, numerological etc. reasons for sadness while trying to blame a few
people who came to mind.
Finally, I realized, I just had to cry!!
It is my fact of life. If I don’t have a good boohoo on
a semi-regular basis, I get stuck. My mom knew this. She always said, “Earlene
is really predictable. She cries when she’s happy, angry, sad, frustrated,
tired, and anything in between. If she’s really gritchy, sit her down in front
of a movie about a dying dog or child, she’ll have a good cry and then be singing.”
You can bet that on that day I was waiting for the singing part to start.
What I have come to know is that shedding or releasing
tears is a good thing. Some studies have shown that we release toxins in our
tears. Others have noticed a reduction of stress, and a few investigators have
hypothesized that the release of tears changes our electro-magnetic field to
reduce the number of damaging positive ions that circulate throughout our
systems.
These positive ions can nick the inside of blood
vessels causing a place for the body to try to heal this wound with (simplistically explained
here) a plaque build-up. Others spark a change in how a cell reproduces itself.
It is believed by some that this is how cancer can develop.
I don’t know what’s true. I only have one personal
experience to go by. My late husband never cried. If he did, only a few tears would
water his eyes before he would shut them down. In the 34 years I knew him, I
only saw him spill a few tears during several intense losses: when he was left
as a divorcee, when his son was in trouble, when each of his parents died and
two mentor friends passed on, and when his daughter crossed over.
His tears were sparse even though I knew his heart was
heavy.
It’s ironic that when he passed it was caused by an extreme
collection of fluid (caused by metastatic cancer) in his pericardial sac which
ultimately crushed his heart before causing it to explode in his chest. I can’t
help but wonder if all that fluid might have been unshed tears.
