and insisted that my crying was inappropriate?
What other beauty would I be dead to? What
kind of truth? Before a single person had died of
Covid-19, we were succumbing to an addiction
to pain relief; the pandemic has only expanded
our capacity for overdose and compounded our
aversion to grief.
How many funerals and memorials have we
not attended in the last two years? How many
of us mourners remain ungathered? More mass
bereavement feels warranted. And if I’m talking
about an event grander, more national than the
small, private ceremony my family has postponed
for my aunt Geri, my grandmother and her little
brother Marcellus, what would such a gathering
resemble? I can’t say. I do know, though, how it
would sound. Wounded. 865,000 times over. It’s
a sound for which we’re unprepared and with
which we are strangely unfamiliar. A sound that
no one wants to hear, whose rawness remains
unbidden. A sound, in art, like Anjelica Huston
with minutes to go in a movie called ‘‘The Grift-
ers,’’ down on her knees, howling and gasping
over a dead body — her character’s son, whom
she has just wantonly killed. Huston heaves with
a despair that the movies rarely show us.
I once did that sort of crying, on the day my
mother died. She was ill, so her death was antic-
ipated. Still, there’s no preparation for the for-
eign force that takes over. I had always imaginedin a theater not of inhumanity but of ahumanity,
an uncertainty about what it is to be human at all.
The ancient Greeks knew: Tears must be it.
We Americans are quite possibly disastrous
sympathizers, afraid of one another’s feelings.
They’re an aff ront. I have to admit to paralysis
anytime I come across someone weeping openly
— in a conference room, on the subway, wander-
ing around an airport, at a bar. What’s needed
here? Maybe I’ve monitored the situation from
afar, until a sense of voyeurism compels me
either to look away or to just check on the per-
son already. Rare are the inquiries smarter than:
‘‘Are you OK?’’ It’s a question that then obligates
the suff erer to pauses her distress and issue an
‘‘I’m fi ne,’’ which is sometimes meant to reassure
me, to swear that I can delete the message her
red eyes and swollen face have transmitted to
my empathy. Off ers of relief have been declined
with pride, with testiness, with tender uncertain-
ty because somehow we’ve learned that a strang-
er’s off er of concern still amounts to an invasion
of privacy. This is why watching artists cry is easy.
No one is implicated. We’re excused from the
potential awkwardness of conferring comfort.
It’s been two long years of spotty attendance
at our cathedrals of crying. I can’t pretend that
moviegoing was in great shape before theaters
became a pestilent vector. We now have access,
for instance, to a galactic load of Korean tele-
vision fully equipped to well us up while we
knit scarves or fold clothes. It’s simply easier to
stay home and sob when, say, Mahalia Jackson
graces the stage in the middle of ‘‘Summer of
Soul’’; and for a while it was far safer. But absent
a more robust moviegoing culture, we’ve for-
gone a ritual of shared expression, a communal
roost in which all tears are OK, be they shed for
Steven Spielberg’s ‘‘West Side Story’’ or Ken-
neth Branagh’s ‘‘Belfast,’’ each its own style of
weepie that — as the industry watchers among
us will eagerly point out — are not hits. That
might be how estranged from the commingling
of our emotional lives we’ve grown in 40 years.
The man who made ‘‘E.T.,’’ the sentimentalist to
whom we once fl ocked for emotional sensation,
now can’t lure us out of our homes.
For a long time, we’ve been numbing our-
selves. Even our lacrimal surrogates in Holly-
wood have been turning their backs on us and
toward age-defying procedures that culminate
in faces that can no longer approximate our sor-
row. A crisis of deadening is being passed down
to the next generation. The renewal of book bans
on works of fi ction, by the likes of Toni Morrison
and Art Spiegelman, ensures the alienation of
children from their feelings, the disconnection
of those feelings from a shared history of hard-
ship and the extinction of the moral imagina-
tion. We are running from ourselves, evading
the inevitability of emotional diffi culty. What if
my mother had yanked us up that day at ‘‘E.T.’’
her death drawing out calm sobs, something
‘‘dignifi ed,’’ like the old movie actors. What
came up, instead, was violent and wild. I stalked
around a hallway outside the bedroom where I
found her, as though I were hunting for some-
thing that had been misplaced — my mother’s
life, her soul. The wailing was disbelief. It was
helplessness and futility. It was abandonment
and fi nality. I cried so loud that I worried her
neighbors would call the police: Yes, I’d like to
report a murder at 1044. My eyes had shriveled
to raisins; all I could see were tears in a queue
patiently awaiting their drop, an infi nity pool
of anguish. Her death was peaceful, almost as
we had planned. And yet — only an actor pre-
pares. It’s a peculiar experience, crying that way:
undammed, with your entire self, with every-
thing in you, roaring out. I felt as if I had died,
too — because, in a way, I had.
It’s here that I’d like to amend that biochemi-
cal assertion about how our crying distinguishes
us from animals. Crying arouses the animal in
us. I didn’t know such a creature, a werewolf in
my case, resided in there. Not a hulk but a hurt,
kept far from the surface. For safety. You don’t
access it. The wolf fi nds you. It drags immense
sorrow through these tiny openings — nostrils,
eyes, the mouth. It’s the animal in us that needs
to speak now. It’s waiting, ready for a mass howl-
ing when we are.