One Last Tear

I was just four when I discovered that some grown-ups cry. That’s because I saw my mommy dragging my daddy down the stairs, Her eyes so full of tears that they fairly poured down her flimsy nightgown. Daddy wasn’t crying. Daddy was dead. When I was six, I had cause to cry on my own account. Mommy had been dating a man, she said if they married I would be a flower girl. One night she came into my room crying a little and said she was sorry, they eloped. I cried quietly. I’m not sure it was all for me. At eleven, a whole new kind of tears entered my life. Asleep in my room late at night, I awoke to my mom screaming and sobbing. My three-year-old sister slept next to me so I just listened as my stepfather beat her. I cried so hard. I thought I would never stop. Age 20 and happy to be in college away from the pain. Divorced, mom found a new love in vodka, and he controlled her more than her ex. I brought my love home to meet her, and she asked him how he could like a fat, lazy slob like me? I knew I shouldn’t cry. It didn’t stop me. In my life have been many opportunities to cry. Being told I would die when my daughter was a baby and I thirty-two, The death of my mother, my youngest daughter’s fiancé dying of cystic fibrosis. With each tear I fade a little. I’m almost gone. So now in my 50s, I find out my oldest daughter is sick. Stage four lymphoma, and she didn’t cry through chemo, hair loss, Almost dying four times in treatment, emergency surgery, pulmonary embolism. It’s okay. I cried enough for both of us. She is twenty-six, and sometimes I can hear her crying. Her lymphoma is back, creeping into her spine like an armed terrorist, And while it is a small encampment that hasn’t grown, our fear, sadness, and helplessness increases daily. I hear her cry. I make sure she can’t hear me. I am approaching sixty; sometimes I feel one hundred. I wonder if God has allotted us a finite number of tears for our lifetime, If those tears are stored in the chambers of our heart and we need to conserve some for what tomorrow holds. Let her last tear be her last tear. But give me one last tear — sparkling and light — dancing down my cheek in gratitude as I fade to clear. fbruary 2, 2019