| | Virginia, I think doctors tend to err on the side of not getting people's hopes up. My cousin isn't one to listen to advice, god bless her.
Bill, that's a lesson that too many people never learn. Again, in the positive sense we were just talking about tearing up, not wailing out loud. And even if you had skinned your knee, it would indeed have been a good lesson to learn that wailing doesn't help but that neither are mere tears a thing of shame. Part of the problem lies in our tendency not to make the distinction between tearing, weeping, crying, sobbing and wailing. Too many parents see (especially negative emotions) as weakness or an annoyance or as embarrassing. In my family we were not aloud to wail in order to get our way, but honest crying was never discouraged. I know people who are over 30 who get terribly upset about things that they cannot do anything about. If you got in a tiff with a coworker at 3 in the afternoon, does it make sense to rage about that injustice at bed time? In that sense, while the underlying emotion might be valid, the way and especially the time one expresses it may be counterproductive.
On the day my sister died at age 20 when I was 24 I had to walk across the entire width of Manhattan including Central Park, I wept silently the entire time, but neither sobbed nor felt ashamed of my tears. Hundreds of people saw me crying, they kept silent and there was actually a certain dignity to it both in my carriage and their occasional sympathetic looks and universal respectful silence. On the day my best friend and the love of my life was murdered, I sobbed and wailed and asked my parents if they still wanted that dying oak in the back yard chopped down. I wiped my eyes and took the axe to it.
Emotions in themselves are not a sickness or a passion in the way that the Greeks and the Romans held. Stoic indifference can be an ideal outwardly when you're in the midst of a life or death battle. But properly expressed, pain and mourning are just as good and healthy as pleasure and joy - they exist because we value and because we are alive.
Ted Keer
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