Is Sappiness Directly Proportional to Age?
I’ve been bawling a lot recently. What’s up with that?
So, yes, I’m pre-menopausal. And yes, I’ve had a pretty rough week (a rough month or two if I’m being real about it).
But I have found myself tearing up more and more recently.
Could it be my age? Do you get sappier the older you get? Is the amount of sentimentality directly proportional to how long you’ve been alive?
I got addicted to Ken Burns’s Country Music documentary on PBS a while back. Oh my word, the songs and the footage they have is unreal. It speaks to me on a very deep level, but I think that’s what country music is supposed to do.
One of the episodes near the end talked about Kathy Mattea coming into the business. Her soon-to-be husband had written a song about his grandparents and she knew she had to record it.
His grandmother had Alzheimer’s and not only didn’t remember anyone, but hadn’t spoken in months. She and his grandfather had been together for more than 60 years.
His grandfather fell ill and ended up in the same hospital as his grandmother. Realizing no one had taken grandpa up to see grandma, Kathy’s husband wheeled his grandfather into the room.
He watched as his grandpa took his grandma’s hand.
After months of not speaking and likely longer in recognizing anyone, she made eye contact with her husband of more than 60 years and in a relatively clear voice, asked, “Where’ve you been?”
You guys, I was listening to this as I got dinner ready one evening and when I heard that story, I had an actual physical reaction in my chest. I felt my heart contract and my eyes immediately stung and the kitchen swam in my vision.
I just started crying.
Can you imagine it? One, brief moment of recognition and memory and a love that defies time and illness.
It quite literally took my breath away. I couldn’t maintain the emotion it brought up.
But it’s not just country music documentaries. I’ve found myself tearing up a lot recently. Commercials. Songs. Movies.
I can’t tell if it’s hormones, or age and experience that’s doing it.
My heart’s been broken more than once. I picture it held together with band-aids and duct tape, but it keeps going, still pumping. It can still feel. It can still love and recognize beauty. It’s battered, but not destroyed.
I’ve considered getting a tattoo of a wrecked heart with tape all over it some day. I don’t have any tats, but if I get one, I’d like it to mean something.
Does it take something like a broken heart to give us the kind of sentimentality that makes us cry at touching moments?
Because we’ve known pain, does it make the meaningful stories that much more powerful?
When I was a kid, I cried because I physically hurt (scraped knees sucked) and maybe a couple of times because I couldn’t get a toy or something I wanted. (That didn’t last too long in my house, though.)
I think I was much older when I really started crying when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes on his way down Mount Crumpit. Is it experience that gives us empathy and sentimentality?
I was bullied a lot in elementary school. Never really knew why, but does anyone? In kindergarten, it was physical bullying and by fourth grade it was mental bullying.
I can still, decades later, remember how it felt to be that helpless little kid.
After grad school, my grandma passed away. Losing her hit me hard. Hers was the first real significant loss I experienced. Thankfully, I was older and I know how incredibly lucky I am to have lived as long as I did without knowing what it was like to really say goodbye to a loved one.
Once we lose someone — either from death or the person choosing to no longer be in our lives — does that give us the sense memory needed for sentimentality?
Or when we’re treated badly by someone, do those moments stay with us and is that what’s really coming up when we tear-up at sad movies or poignant documentaries?
My dad, heaven love him, can cry at the drop of a hat. Anything even hinting at tenderness or sentiment has him welling up right before my eyes. The older he gets, the worse the crying becomes.
So, is it age that does it?
Do we really begin to appreciate what’s valuable in life the closer we get to leaving this earth?
Or do we have to be in-touch with our emotions in the first place to have these reactions?
I know there are a lot of people who don’t cry much at all. Remember the episode of Friends when Chandler can’t cry? Eventually, he does “open the gates,” as he calls it, and then can’t seem to stop himself.
For a long time, I’ve seen tears as weakness. When I got to the point where I couldn’t stop the crying, I considered it losing control over myself. No joke.
Looking back, I realize how tough that kind of attitude made handling any kind of emotion. Trying to block or ignore what you feel is never a good idea.
It’s probably part of the reason I have issues with anxiety. Keeping everything in is like capping boiling water. Eventually, that steam has to get out. It’s simple physics.
Now, through my work with acupuncture and Eastern philosophy, I know how beneficial it is to cry and release that emotion. It might be difficult to do and living in that kind of moment is pretty shitty, but it’s also pretty necessary.
Maybe that’s part of my penchant for tears. Because I changed my views about crying, I can now see it as a healthy response to problems and maybe that’s why tears seem to come a little faster for me now.
I had a moment a few weeks ago driving home from work where I’d just had it and started bawling. My instant reaction was to try to calm down, but I actually stopped myself and said, “No, Jen. Feel this.”
That obnoxious voice in the back of my head said, rather insolently, “I don’t want to.”
That’s pretty much when I knew I had to sit in it and with it. That obnoxious voice has been screwing with me for years.
The Five Element Theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine says that Anger, Fear, Grief, Joy and Overthinking are natural parts of human existence. Each of these emotions is related to a season, an organ, a taste, and more.
I still struggle to consider anger, fear, grief and worry as necessary. But to truly be balanced, we need them. Not in excess, but we do need them.
So maybe my propensity for tears is because I just allowed the boiling water to remain uncapped. I gave myself permission to release it and in so doing, find a way to let go and discover a little bit of peace.
Huh. Might not be a bad way to live after all.
