The unbearable lightness of crying

We sat around silently waiting for the next person to say something meaningful. The silence was thick. The atmosphere felt discharged of energy – no emotions, just sombreness. The lampshades did little to brighten the room as muffled shadows greyed out any clarity.

Then, the quiet guy on the couch, who rarely spoke but would add an occasional nod to the conversation, slowly put out his cigarette in the ashtray he had close by at all times. The last time he made a speech longer than 30 seconds was at the opening ceremony a few days earlier. He leaned into the glow of the dusty lampshade and asked us, “Why are the tears of sorrow so sweet when the tears of joy are bitter?”

Some eyes opened, blinking. You could sense the thoughts being processed into some sort of answer. My mind raced. Do tears taste at all? Aren’t tears a chemical reaction to the body’s emotional and physical state? Aren’t tear ducts actually conduits for the poisons in your system, literally flushing out the bothersome chemical residues?

The after-effects of emotional distress can affect the body’s functions so much that grown men will actually sob when the right buttons are pushed and the right chemicals, such as beer, are induced into the body. This conference was indeed interesting. I thought about it for a while on the jet back to Montreal then straight north. The old man was forgotten over time. Then I remembered this moment some 30 years later.

There are also non-chemical reactions that are totally psycho when it comes to producing tears. Crazy tears I call them. There aren’t too many things that can make a grown man cry, but some things are just too much to handle. Then the waterspouts start churning out rivers of sorrow, elation or anger. I decided to test this on myself to see how much it would take to make a grown man cry.

First, there weren’t any chemicals around that I could use safely and not produce tears of pain. Tears of pain are an involuntary reaction to intense symptoms, such as a stubbed toe, a stepped-on ingrown toenail, or gouging a hand with a potato peeler – that sort of pain. I skipped the tears of pain tests and immediately thought of channel surfing my TV to test out the tears-of-emotion factor.

The satellite receiver was already recording a soap opera so I decided to watch this imaginary reality show that is based on extreme human reactions and bad acting. I started having a tears-of-pain reaction a half hour later. Then, mercifully, the show ended. Now I know why these shows are so addictive. They literally make you believe in a make-believe world full of people wearing tons of makeup. I thought that perhaps that this is the source of the fabled crocodile tears.

A three-minute episode called an infomercial came up next and I decided to watch it, since it was about poor people who were starving to death in countries that don’t have the same rich environment that we do. A tinge of anger tears welled up until I remembered that this was a money drive to pay people to pay other people to do the dirty work of what their industry was all about – pulling at your heart strings as a way to pull out your purse or wallet, using a poor child in their marketing drive.

Frustrated, I changed channels and settled on something familiar to me – science. It was about life aboard the International Space Station and starred Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He reminded me of Homer Simpson’s next-door neighbour Ned Flanders. You know, the guy with a fistful of diddly doos and dads.

Interested, I decided to take a break from my insane research project and watch the show. By the time Hadfield was halfway through his famous performance of the David Bowie song “Major Tom,” some tears had trickled down my rosy, unshaven cheeks. What? What’s this? Space tears? Well, I guess those are the best kind of tears.