It’s Crying Time

Eyes up, no tears. Dad’s stage-four cancer, I thought, shouldn’t cause everyone to break down.

With each new dilator the surgeon inserted into my neck with a small pop, the hole accessing my jugular vein grew as the skin split. My face was hidden under sterile blue paper as I lay in that Salt Lake City operating room in 2013, but I still squeezed my eyes shut and grit my teeth against the pain. Though numbed from the base of my neck to my ear, I could feel the unnaturalness of a protective barrier being broken down, again and again, to allow for a tiny tube to sit within my vein.

The surgeon was impersonal and somewhat gruff, and I was terrified but very stubborn. Before we got to the business of slits and blood, he turned on a CD player from which either Jim Croce or Harry Chapin or America or Cat Stevens crooned in dulcet tunes. I made myself a promise I wouldn’t cry.

There are people with actual cancer just eight stories above you, I told myself. Dad hasn’t shed a tear, so you shouldn’t, either. Time to be strong. Eyes up, no tears.

Dad’s stage-four cancer, I thought, shouldn’t cause everyone to break down. There had to be a hardliner. And I had decided that person would be me.

Still—as the surgeon continued to open a sterile wound in my neck, in which he would insert a port from which all of my blood would be pulled from my body, I could feel the prickle of tears; of vulnerability. I could already feel my resolve melting along with the rude shoves of a foreign object into one of my body’s venous highways. I heard the chords of an organ pulsing in my head as I did my damnedest to keep that lump in my throat from leaking out my eyes; the music definitely wasn’t coming from the surgeon’s speakers, which were still emanating gentle men’s voices. It was a wail, picking up speed like a summer storm, and in my head Janis Joplin’s voice grew into a feral scream.

Crrrrryyyyyyyy baby, she sang, as if taunting me. Cry baby. Cry baby. Honey, welcome back home.

*

In the liminal space between childhood and the self-consciousness that comes with growing older, crying was the first aspect of my life that made me feel both like myself and like a stranger. I was an emotional kid; my grandma told my parents I cried too much. Feelings were overwhelming for me, and my fears would skyrocket at the thought of horrors waiting around the bend. As a fifth-grader, I had detailed visions of one of my sisters hanging out on the playground alone and being taken by a strange man. Another fear was that one of my sisters would be trapped somewhere and unable to escape. One night, when these anxieties were crowding especially thick, my mom brought me on her lap and explained that if I spent my life worrying and not living it, I would let the bad guys win.

In what I now understand was a move to save my young brain from general anxiety, I began developing coping skills to combat the emotions bursting through. My first target was crying—easily identifiable and widely maligned as weak, or only for girls. So I hardened my resolve, rationalized away the feelings of sadness or despair, and I stopped. I wouldn’t be caught sniveling about a problem when I could be doing something to fix it.

At one point in my twenties, my therapist asked if I ever let myself cry—just to let loose when I was alone. I laughed at her. When I told a friend about it, they created a Google calendar with crying time scheduled in. I laughed at the notifications whenever they popped up. Such a breakdown was beneath me, the strong one.

Then one day after a particularly rough therapy session, I felt my throat clench. Sadness slid over me. My eyes prickled, and I thought, What the hell. I tried to cry.

Nothing happened.

I kept trying. Still nothing. After a few minutes, I had a realization: After years of intentionally holding back tears, I couldn’t break the dam.

*

Never more comfortable than when I’m wearing headphones, I made a playlist—titled “A Lot of Crying”—to help me. Music is like an emotional cheat sheet for me, because I can feel it deeply, even if the topic seems foreign. Faith Hill’s “Cry” was an automatic add, given its teenage-hyperbole feel. In this song, Faith implores her lover to cry, in order to prove they had feelings: Could you cry a little, lie just a little, pretend that you’re feeling a little more pain?

I took this song as an imperative. And while the tears still didn’t come, I would find myself yell-singing this song in the car, heart pumping, feelings raging, throat clenching, eyes blazing. The tears weren’t falling, but I was feeling, and it was a safe way to do it, because no one could hear me and I was still on familiar ground by avoiding the tears.

“Catharsis,” my therapist explained.

Songs about crying became an obsession for me, especially when men sang them; how could they get away with emoting so openly? I have spent hours with Roy Orbison’s warbling in my ears, singing about how he’s so lonesome he could cry, or how he’s crying, crying, crying over you. Or how there’ll be no teardrops tonight. Or how it was time to cry. And why women cry.

Then there was 2Pac, letting me know that even thugs cry, and Ray Charles and Barbra Streisand telling me it’s crying time again; that there are times when crying is okay, expected. Even Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” took on a different tone in my head. Instead of mockery, which it is, the refrain of baby go on and just cry me a river felt more like a cheer squad telling me I could do it.

What struck me the most about all of the songs, across all genres, was how they ached with sadness because of some happiness that came before. The reason all of the singers felt it was necessary to cry—to emote outwardly—was because they also felt it had been necessary to open up and accept happiness in the first place. They were mourning what had once been wonderful and beautiful.

*

Around the same time I was stumbling into these realizations about crying, my dad was diagnosed with stage-four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I refused to weep in the face of my mother’s and my sisters’ tears; someone had to stay strong, I reasoned, even as my definition of “strong” was shifting in the back of my mind. When the diagnosis came, I didn’t cry, but I realized that it wasn’t a show of strength so much as rather sophisticated denial. I accepted pieces of it—Dad is sick, this is bad—but not others, like how I might feel about losing a parent. I didn’t want to let myself imagine it.

Catching cancer at stage four is a bit like trying to shove tears back into the tear ducts in that the jig is already up. Aside from a new type of procedure or experimentation, there’s often not much they can do. My family spent months in Limbo, not knowing what treatment would work. I started dreading phone calls from my mom because I knew it would just be more bad news, more for me to throw on the pile of things I had to keep tightly lidded in order to stay clear- and dry-eyed.

Dad’s doctor suggested a medical trial in Utah: a new procedure of pulling stem cells from a donor’s blood to remake his bone marrow entirely, eliminating its cancer-making tendencies. My sisters and I were tested. My mom called me a couple of weeks later, right at the end of a workday. She was already in tears, this time the happy kind. “You’re the match, my girl.”

“I knew it!” I said.

She put my dad on the line. Dad, much like me, avoids the hard feelings and goes straight for the jokes. This is how I understand him: If he’s crying, I know the situation is out of control. If he’s holding it together like me, we can do something about it.

“You can have my stem cells on one condition,” I said to him. “You have to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.”

He was quiet for a beat, then said, “I’ll think about it. But if I wake up praising the Democrats, I’m going to tell the doctors to unplug me.”

This was our shared safe ground, jokes and political parries. It kept me from thinking about how, if this didn’t work, he’d die.

*

Many needle pricks and blood tests later, I was on the table in the operating room in Salt Lake City. The nurse attending the surgery must have heard something from me, a sniffle or a whimper, because he lifted the corner of the sterile sheet covering my head and reached for my hand. I already felt like a traitor to myself, to everyone in pain in this hospital. The nurse’s attentions made it worse. I was convinced I’d failed the one objective I’d given myself.

The rest of the week was a blur of Neupogen shots to make my bone marrow produce the stem cells and narcotics to numb the bone pain that followed, ending with two days of sitting connected at the neck to a machine that systematically removed all my blood, filtered the stem cells out of it, then put the rest of the blood back into my neck through the catheter in my jugular.

When my mom said a prayer over the meager bag of stem cells before they went into my dad’s system, I didn’t cry. Secretly relieved I was drugged and less likely to weep, I still found myself jealous of my sisters, crying over Skype, their feelings and faces open about our family being at this precipice between life and death. I wondered if all of this would make more sense somehow if I just let go, like they did.

With the stem cells now in Dad’s veins, the nurses came to pull the port out of my jugular. Several of them had to hold me down on my side, pull up layers of medical tape that pulled off layers of skin, and extract the tube as if it were Excalibur. I resented being the stone; blood spurted out of my open wound before they clamped down quickly with pressure and gauze.

All of it hurt—it felt like my neck was burning from the inside and the outside. I yelped in pain and started crying, tears like I hadn’t seen in years pouring from my eyes. There was nothing I could do to stop them. I felt pathetic that my dad, the tough guy who didn’t cry even though he was the one actually suffering from cancer, had witnessed it. Janis Joplin growled in my ears again, but Roy Orbison crooned.

“Babe, of course you cried, that stuff really hurts,” my wife said later, as we drove back to Montana.

My bones ached, and my neck still burned. “It’s nothing compared to what he’s going through,” I said. “I’d do it every week if I had to.”

“I know,” she said, before she took my hand. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

*

Months later, we learned that my stem cells were making themselves at home in his bones, that my bone marrow was growing there now instead of his, that it was working and Dad would live. On the phone, I told my mom the process hadn’t really been that bad, at least for me. I was back to being “strong.”

Then she told me what she saw while I was on the surgery table, when I was hooked up to the blood machine, and later when I was being held down for the port removal. Those were some of the few times she saw my father cry in Utah, she said.

His tears were for me.

I hung up the phone, put my head in my hands, and let the tears squeezing through my eyelids go. This time, when the organ started up and Janis started to wail, the taunt was gone. Cry, baby. Honey, welcome back home.