Tears Of Things

In Portuguese there is a word, saudade, that has no equivalent in English. It comes from the Latin solitās, meaning solitude, and it first appeared in the thirteenth century, in the poems of troubadours writing about distant lovers. Some linguists believe the word was born during the Age of Discoveries, when Portuguese sailors left for seas that had no maps and the women who stayed behind had to find language for the particular kind of missing that comes when you do not know if the person is lost or dead or simply never coming back. Fernando Pessoa called it the presence of absence. The Welsh have hiraeth, which is older, from hir meaning long and -aeth meaning pain or grief. The earliest uses of the word, in medieval Welsh poetry, meant the sorrow that follows the death of someone you love. The Russians have toska, which Nabokov said no single English word could render. At its deepest, he wrote, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. A dull ache of the soul. A longing with nothing to long for. The Japanese have mono no aware, the pathos of things, a word for the particular grief of knowing that everything you are looking at right now is in the process of disappearing. In Arabic there is ya’aburnee, which translates literally to “you bury me” and means I hope I die before you do because I cannot imagine surviving a world where you are gone. Every language I have ever studied has found a way to say this. Every culture has language for what happens when someone you love is gone. English does not. English has “grief,” which is five letters long and means almost nothing.

There is no word in any language I have found for the specific emptiness that follows when a child dies. Mothers are not supposed to outlast their children. This is something people say as if it is a rule, as if biology or God or the universe signed an agreement, as if saying it out loud could make it true. I woke up the day after my son died and the light came through the window the same way it always had and I remember thinking that this was obscene, that someone somewhere was laughing, that dinner still needed to be cooked, that the world should have stopped and hadn’t. The microwave went off. A beep. And I was back in that room. The heart monitor flatlining. The doctors laughing about golf. About vacations. Their mouths moving and sounds coming out and none of it making sense because they were standing over my son and he was dead and they were talking about the weekend. Faces blurring. The sun beating through the window too hot too bright and I couldn’t breathe and I wanted to run and I wanted to scream and I wanted someone to help me and no one was helping me and I was bargaining with God on the floor of my own kitchen because a microwave beeped. That is what grief is. It is a microwave beeping on a Friday morning and suddenly you are dying again.

Two thousand years ago Virgil wrote a line in the Aeneid that scholars have been arguing about ever since. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. It comes from Book One. Aeneas has lost everything. Troy has fallen, his friends are dead, he has been shipwrecked on the coast of Carthage, a place he has never been. He wanders into a temple and finds murals on the walls depicting the war that destroyed his life, his own dead painted in a stranger’s city by people who were never there. And he stands in front of them and weeps and says this line that no one has been able to translate in two thousand years. Lacrimae rerum. The tears of things. Or the tears for things. Or there are tears inside things. The Latin is ambiguous and Virgil meant it to be. Some scholars read it as the universe feels our pain. Others read it as suffering is what it means to be human. Others read it as the objects themselves are weeping. I read it standing in my son’s room three weeks after he died, surrounded by things that still smelled like him, and I understood every translation at once. It lives in the walls. In the crib. In the shirt still folded in the drawer. Lacrimae rerum. If you have ever lost someone you know this is not a metaphor.

Nobody tells you that the people you lost will follow you into every relationship you have after them. Grief builds something around you. It was supposed to go away and it never did and you forget it is there until someone tries to get close and your whole body says no. I have been saying no for so long I do not know how to stop. I have spent decades building walls and calling it survival and I do not know anymore if I am protecting myself or burying myself. What I want is so simple I almost didn’t write it. I want to lower every guard and stop running the math on who leaves next. I have never been good at letting them. I think the truest thing I can say about grief at this distance is that it did not make me afraid of death It made me afraid of love. And I love anyway. And that is the cruelest trick of it. That you will keep loving. That you will keep showing up with your whole broken self and your ridiculous open hands and you will keep letting people in because the alternative is a life where nothing ever touches you again and you already know what that feels like and it is worse.

English has over a million words. It has a word for the fear of long words and a word for the day before yesterday and a word for the feeling of light through glass. It has orphan, for a child who has lost their parents. It has widow, for a woman who has lost her husband. It does not have a word for a mother who has lost her child. I have looked. The Italian struggimento gets close. A consuming inner torment, a destruction from the inside out. But it is too romantic. Too operatic. My grief is not dramatic. It is quiet and ordinary and I have stopped trying to separate it from myself. There is no word in any language I have found for I miss you and I live without you every day and I wonder who you would be right now if the world had not taken you from me. The Inuit have iktsuarpok, the act of going outside over and over to check if someone is coming. I understand that word in my body. I have been checking for years. No one is coming. My son is not coming. And still I check. And still I go to the door. And still some part of my brain has not accepted the information, keeps expecting him, keeps calculating how old he would be, what he would look like, what his voice would sound like now. The Portuguese call it the presence of absence. He would be sixteen this year.