Tears have healing qualities. Contrary to popular belief, admitting human weakness through these redemptive teardrops of saltwater strengthens the soul rather than leaving it vulnerable. These drops of liquid liberation work as a supernatural elixir to mend a broken heart and release a wave of peace to wash over a troubled spirit. My earliest memory is of my elder sister and my being removed from our mother’s care around the age of three and being adopted by our grandmother. No words can express the grief of a child that is too young to comprehend what a huge piece of life has been stolen away from her.
I forgot how to cry.
My escape came when I plunged headfirst into a sea of academics hoping that I would drown in AP tests and IB Internal Assessments. In the midst of obsessive school work, I stumbled upon a hobby that allowed me to pour out my heart to an audience without giving my true brokenness away: singing.
I joined choir in 2008 and immediately discovered the liberation that music offered my soul. I took part in the 2009 production of Once Upon a Mattress and the year after played Sister Sophia in the Sound of Music.
Music became my new obsession. I spent hours searching for the perfect songs. The ones that had all the words I wanted to scream to the world at the top of my lungs and wanted my heartbeat to keep time to. Behind every soaring note was a matched throb of pain in every fiber of my being. In this way, I learned to allow music to take my pain and transfer it to an audience and allow myself to inhale deeply bitter-sweet relief as the tears that caught in my throat manifested themselves in the eyes of the spectators.
The news was so unexpected. My sister got a phone call on the morning of March 13th during church. I am still haunted by the vibrancy of her green eyes as her brokenness flowed freely down her cheeks. I asked the most insensitive and sarcastic question possible at that moment:
“Who died?”
To my horror and shame, my question turned out to be prophetic. It was mom, the morning after her thirty-seventh birthday.
I could not even manage to ring a single tear from my barren reserve. Through every offer of prayer, every gentle squeeze of my shoulder, every comforting smile my face wore the same mask of serenity as always. But this was not just another bad grade, or sour note; this was out of my control to fix. The tear-streaked faces of my siblings and the wide, pleading eyes of my mother’s husband of three months reflected the pain that I was too weak to show.
Truthfully, I grew up angry with my mother for being unable to raise her five children; more specifically, me.
The job of arranging a memorial fell to my older sister and me. When I was asked to sing at the memorial, I thought nothing of it until the moment had arrived. IB Oral Commentaries and musicals were not even in the same league as the burden that now fell on my shoulders.
It was time to forgive, and to let go.
The song I chose was perfect, “Angel” by Sara McLachlan. I never considered that because my audience was not just the onlookers, but that I was singing for my mother, that in the transferring of my emotion through my voice, it would be reflected from all angles back to me like beams of concentrated light to the point of my core where fire was lit anew. The line that rang the truest, the longest, and the loudest reverberates within my heart even now as a perpetual reminder “you’re in the arms of the angels, may you find some comfort here”.
I wept.
For the first time in years the tears broke through the barrier and shattered my defenses. As the lyrics resonated, the tears streamed down my face and into the fissures of my broken heart sealing them and making me whole at last.
