April 23, 2020: Easily Moved, Designated Crier -

One of my new pandemic pals hosts a weekly short-story discussion group. I used to avoid book groups at all cost, and now I’ve got a monthly book group and a weekly short-story group. Go figure.

Anyway, she (I’m going to call her Abby, because she’s a new friend, and might want a pseudonym, who knows) was talking about how she had been listening to the week’s short story on her headphones, while taking a solo walk through her neighborhood, and she had been crying, and she imagined the neighbors were wondering what was up. She said, “I’m not a sad person. I’m just easily moved.”

I told her I loved that explanation. I generally refer to the same condition by saying, “I’m the designated crier.”

I used to think this was a failing.  I remember some years ago, my sweet former colleague Ted died, and I went to his funeral and got on an unstoppable crying jag. Ted was a dear man, and we had worked together for decades, and then his ancient mom died and he came into a small inheritance, and he quit as fast as he could. He had wanted to spend some years doing good deeds – his big dream was to deliver food for Meals on Wheels – but then he had gotten very sick. He wrote to me, before he died, “I had wanted to care for others, but I have had to learn how to let others care for me instead.”

Before I knew him, Ted was a Catholic priest. Then he fell in love and got married and had kids, and came to work for the book company. But he was always active in his church, taught some Adult Ed classes, always took Easter Monday off because he needed it after the exertions of Holy Week. And at the funeral, a bunch of his old priest buddies performed the ceremony together. In my memory, I see nine of them up there in their robes, one head guy and a virtual chorus line of backup priests, all doing the manual rite at the same time. For an old choreographer like me, it was surreal, and vaguely funny, and altogether too much.

I was sitting with a few coworkers, including, providentially, Lynne. Lynne was the sort of person who always had extra little packets of Kleenex in her purse, and she kept handing them to me, and I kept crying, and snot kept dripping off my chin (and let’s all just admit that those little packets of Kleenex are WORTHLESS if you are having a decent, snotty cry), and the more I cried, the more I cried, and eventually my nose was all plugged, so I was drawing these big, audible, ragged mouth breaths and it was just quite a thing. I was pretty embarrassed, and I couldn’t stop.

I mopped up and stuck around afterward long enough to go to the reception and say howdy to Ted’s son, and then I dragged myself home, where the phone rang, and it was my sister-in-law, Missy. She said How are you, and I said, I just went to a funeral and I cried harder than any member of the actual FAMILY of the guy who died, I’m so embarrassed!

And she said, “Ohhh. I am sure that meant a lot to them.” 

It was really a nice thing to say, but Missy is like that. And it allowed me to start thinking of myself as performing a useful function: designated crier. If you are afraid nobody will pitch a total fit at your funeral, just leave instructions that I be invited. I will take care of it.

(This post is dedicated to Elizabeth Warren, a woman I’ve never even met, whose oldest brother, Don, a man I never met, died Tuesday from COVID-19.)