Style & Serenity

Sometimes it comes without warning. A flood of tears, no clear trigger, nothing I can point to and say that’s what did it. I’ve always been an emotional person, crying comes easily to me, sometimes too easily. But this is different. This is the flood that catches even me off guard. And in the moment, I don’t always know why. What I do know is what comes after: relief. A kind of clearing.

For a long time that not-knowing unsettled me. When the tears started flowing, I wouldn’t run through a list of suspects. I’d just ask why. Why am I like this? What’s wrong with me? I have everything. A good life, people who love me, nothing to complain about. So why am I sitting here crying over nothing I can name?

Some of it, I think, is old. Things I’ve carried for years that don’t ask permission before they surface. I don’t always know which thread it’s pulling on, and I’ve stopped needing to know.

John O’Donohue, in his poem “For Grief,” writes about sorrow as something with its own intelligence, separate from ours:

All you can depend on now is that

Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.

More than you, it knows its way

And will find the right time

To pull and pull the rope of grief

Until that coiled hill of tears

Has reduced to its last drop.

I keep coming back to that image, the coiled hill of tears. It reframes the whole thing. Sorrow isn’t waiting for my permission or my explanation. It has its own timeline, its own logic, and it pulls when it’s ready, whether or not I’ve consciously processed whatever it’s attached to. Maybe especially when I haven’t.

There’s something to this beyond just feeling true. Tears born of emotion aren’t the same as tears from a sliced onion, the body makes them differently, and releases something different through them. After a real cry, there’s a calm that follows, an actual settling in the body, not just in the mind. That’s not me being poetic. The Greeks and Romans believed something close to this thousands of years ago, that tears worked like a release valve, carrying out whatever the body no longer had room to hold.

So maybe my body knows something before I do, and waits for the moments when nothing urgent is happening to finally let go.

I think a lot of us were raised to treat crying like a malfunction. Something to apologize for, explain, get under control as fast as possible. I used to wipe my face and say sorry before anyone had even asked what was wrong. Now I’m trying to let it just be a thing my body does, without needing a tidy reason attached to it.

That doesn’t mean every cry is mysterious. Sometimes I know exactly why. But the ones that arrive without warning, that don’t trace back to anything obvious, those used to scare me. Now they feel almost like trust. My body telling me it’s safe enough here to stop holding on so tightly.

If this has happened to you, the unexplained tears, the sudden wave with no clear source, you’re not broken and you’re not imagining it. Something in you found a moment it could finally use.

I’d love to hear if this is familiar.

Father’s Day arrives whether you’re ready or not. The store displays go up two weeks early, ties, grills, “World’s Best Dad” mugs and you walk past them like nothing’s wrong, because nothing is wrong, not really. He’s just not here to buy a gift for.

You notice who still calls to ask if you’re okay. You notice the people who forget, too, and you don’t hold it against them, because how would they know June has this shape now.

Some years you’ll see his handwriting on something, a report he wrote, a check stub, a name on the back of a photo — and the day cracks open for ten minutes before it closes again.

That’s most of what enduring looks like. Not a single hard moment you brace for and survive. A hundred small ones, scattered through an ordinary day, that you didn’t see coming.

Most years it gets easier to carry, not because the missing shrinks but because you get stronger arms.

And there’s a strange comfort in the fact that the day still catches you off guard. It means the love hasn’t worn down to nothing. The ache is just what’s left standing where he used to stand.

I miss you Dad.❤️

I saw it on Facebook first. Maria, 49 years old, gone. The kind of news that stops you mid-scroll, that you read twice because you need to. A few minutes later, my daughter texted me from Amsterdam. She knew. Maria was someone that touched my daughter as well.

I sat with that for a moment. Maria, who I’d met through a friend, whose daughter grew up alongside mine from kindergarten. Maria, who had this warmth about her, this strength you could feel just being in the same room with her. A daughter, sister, wife, mother, aunt, friend . A physical trainer, a spin instructor, someone who spent her life getting other people to believe they were capable of more than they thought.

A few days before she passed, I sent her a message. I’m praying for you Maria, sending you love. She never answered. I found out later she was already beyond that. I keep thinking about that message sitting there, and I don’t know what to do with that.

When I heard she was sick again, something in me recognized the pattern. I reached out because I wanted to give her strength, the way I wished I could have given more to someone else I loved. I wanted to show up. And then I didn’t, not the way I meant to, and now I can’t.

I went to the viewing. That was as much as I could carry. Standing there, looking at her face, I said what I needed to say and I left.

A friend of hers who attended the service shared something afterward. Their priest had read a poem, “The Dash” by Linda Ellis, about the small line on a gravestone between the birth date and the death date. That dash is your whole life. Everything you did, everyone you loved, every ordinary Tuesday and every moment that mattered, all of it compressed into a mark so small you could miss it.

I read that and I had to put my phone down.

In 49 years, Maria filled that dash completely. She spent her life moving, getting other people to move with her, to push past what they thought they could do. She gave her warmth to anyone who needed it. She raised two children. She loved her husband. She showed up, over and over, for so many people. The outpouring after her death, the sheer number of people whose lives she touched, I had no idea, and yet somehow I’m not surprised. That was exactly who she was.

What her death did, the thing I wasn’t prepared for, was open up the loss of my friend Liz again.

Liz was my soul sister. We met as first-time mothers, young and overwhelmed and figuring it out together, and we never stopped talking after that. Deep conversations, buckets of laughter, the kind of friendship where you can say anything. She battled cancer more than once and every time she came back fighting, quietly, with so much dignity. When she died in August 2023, I wrote about her here because I didn’t know what else to do with the grief.

I thought I had learned to carry it. I hadn’t. I’d just learned to walk with it.

Two women. Both fighters. Both mothers. Both gone far too soon. One who knew every corner of my heart, and one I was just beginning to know, who I liked so much, who I kept thinking I’d have more time with. Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t ask how close you were. It just arrives.

Both Liz and Maria’s children are still here. That’s the part that stays with me, that settles in and won’t move. These children, who still need their mothers. Who will always need their mothers.

I’m still here too. Still writing my dash, still trying to make it worth something. Still carrying the people I’ve loved and the people I didn’t get enough time with.

Both of them showed me how.

“Here’s to the tears of friendship. May they crystallize as they fall and be worn as gems in the memory of those we love.”

— Christina Applegate, You With the Sad Eyes: A Memoir

If you’re reading this, you’re still writing your dash too. I’d love to hear who you’re carrying with you.