I Am Human
As my more avid readers might know, I have recently been struck with the imminent affliction of having a loved one, and a very dear loved one indeed, suffering from a terminal illness.
You might also recall that I have not, as yet, reported any outward, emotional outbursts on the matter. I have simply maintained something of a steely, numb-ish resolution to be there for my grandma in her final weeks, and be grateful of the good times.
Because, which she is dying, she is certainly not dead, so to speak, meaning that I don’t think I have moved into real grief stage yet. Instead, as I said, there is the numbness, the cold-steel.
Well, somewhat oddly, I think I report that the cracks have started to appear in this steel. The emotions are creeping out.
I guess in a way they started right from the beginning; the deep sighs before responding to questions like ‘how is your grandmother?” The thousand yard staring. Not commonly my thing.
But yesterday, a big crack appeared.
If you have to know, being a Friday, I was off sick from work with a bit of gastro. It was an unpleasant experience to say the least, as anyone who has had it will agree. But what we never remember about being sick is that not just the afflicted area, but your whole body, often hurts.
I thought for a few moments that I had meningitis, because all over I was in pain. Back, shoulders, neck, everything, simply ached. As I had not been able to do any exercise the days previous (possibly due to the onset of the bug), I can’t blame it on muscular soreness.
With this aching and soreness came a malaise, the malaise of being ill, which I must say I loathe. The feeling that this has come around so fast, when really, apart from a slight cold, I have hardly been sick at all in eight months, when I’m pretty sure I had swine flu.
But the moment I’m speaking of came when I watched a movie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. If you haven’t seen this movie, I can’t really explain it without ruining it, because it is quite an unusual story. But it is grippingly tragic. All through it, there are moments of tragedy, in all its forms. If you displace your own background knowledge of Germany, the surrender of the main character’s sister to the Nazi Regimes racial policies is utterly tormenting.
But this was not the moment which hit me. It came when the main character, the son of an Obergruppenfuhrer-SS named Bruno, learns that his beloved grandmother had died in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin.
And I was away. Tears flowed. I was gone. Almost had to pause the movie. It was a hard, deep, honest to goodness cry, thinking about nothing but my grandmother, spurred on by hearing the words “you grandmother is dead” on the box.
Admittedly though, I think that now it’s happened, I feel a little more comfortable with myself.
Before that moment, I had been drifting through life not really knowing how to feel. Often outwardly happy, but scratch the surface, it was just there, the unmitigated sadness. The feeling of the imminent loss. But I couldn’t let out, I couldn’t let my grief just leave.
But after that moment, I think the process has started.
They often say that the best thing for a person to do is have a good hard cry. It is not something that I have always subscribed to.
And not because I consider myself a particularly tough bastard.
I have dealt with some pretty tough shit in my life. Probably not that tough on the world standard. I’ve never had to live in famine, or like Bruno’s friend in the movie, be imprisoned in Auschwitz.
But I’ve dealt with tough shit. I’ve been confronted with some situations which I wouldn’t begrudge upon anybody, like the situation at my former place of employment.
But I never cried over that situation. Not a tear.
I got angry. I swore a lot. But I didn’t cry.
Because crying wasn’t the method of dealing with that. The method of dealing with it was to keep going. Like Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” So I did.
But in situations like this one, where there’s nothing you can do, but have a good hard cry.
I hate to say it, but I am inclined to think that crying is an outward admission of weakness. I don’t wish for this to sound prejudicial, but it is in a way. Crying is the thing we resort to when a situation affects us so badly that we cannot do anything about it but freak out. Sometimes it can happen at wholly inopportune moments.
That is not to say that people who cry are weak. Crying is simply the last in a long line of coping mechanisms. This is possibly (and I’m not trying to be sexist here) more true for guys than girls, but it is essentially the outflow of being emotionally overcome.
It was at that point, when sore as hell, sick as a dog, and thinking about my grandmother, and then having it shown to me in celluloid form, that I finally reached some sort of endstop. I couldn’t contain the emotions anymore. So out they came.
But that’s not my point. Hopefully we are all big enough to admit that crying isn’t a sign of weakness. It is merely a moment of it. Perhaps however if you are thinking about a career in the military you ensure your crying threshold rises above having cranky sergeants scream in your face and call you a c***, (hint Mitchy).
My point is that I think I have finally reached a point where my grief at the situation enveloping my grandmother is coming out.
I am upset, I am sad. And it’s showing. Which, in a way I am happy about. I don’t wish to coop up my grief, make it look like I don’t have emotion, like I’m a robot. I want it to show, because it is a way of showing the love, which is immeasurable in magnitude, that I have for my grandma.
So in a sense, a roundabout way, I am happy that I cried yesterday. And if you think that I am a big girls blouse for doing so, I challenge you to see who can do the two-finger pushups!
