WRITE CLUB: TEARS

Write Club is a monthly, literary bloodsport in which contenders face off against each other with 7-minute essays on competing topics. Below was my combatant essay based on the prompt “TEARS,” facing off against “BLOOD” and “SWEAT.” This essay was performed on July 11, 2023, at The GMan Tavern in Chicago, as part of the super-sized “Write Club: Royal Ramble.” It was defeated in its bout.

Hippocrates referred to them as the four humors.

The four humors are NOT observational, anecdotal, prop, and racism, despite what your college buddy’s co-worker with the collection of craft beer T-shirts insists on trying out at the Chuckle Hut open mic night. No, Hippocrates—by whom I mean the Greek scientist-philosopher whose influence over medicine was so profound that we make newly minted physicians swear an oath bearing his name right before they sign their souls over to UnitedHealth or Cigna—that Hippocrates, he believed that the four humors were blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. He believed that the combination and proportion of each of these fluids within the human body would determine one’s health and wellness, and his students would eventually extrapolate that into personality types and such.

This is all balderdash, of course, but one must forgive Hippocrates his errors since he was practicing his science in the 3rd century BC, which meant he knew only slightly more about medicine than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. These felt certain and measurable to Hippocrates. He couldn’t figure out how to include sweat in the calculus, or saliva, or tears. Tears, after all, are unpredictable and subjective. Tears arrive in the attendance of a singular moment.

Let me put it this way: It used to be much easier for me to watch a child die.

Now wait, waaaait, hold it a moment, I know that listening past the inflammatory soundbite is out of fashion but these are my five minutes with the microphone so I get to explain a statement like that. What I mean is that I used to be able to handle it when Henry Fonda gunned down a ten year-old in Once Upon a Time in the West, or when Georgie Denbrough reaches into the sewer drain to retrieve a folded paper sailboat, or the end of that Breaking Bad episode where Walt and Jesse steal a tanker car full of methylamine. It would shock my nerves, yes, and the horror might reverberate for a long time after, yes, but I could weather it. I could take the punch and keep engaging with the story.

And then there’s this night in spring of 2012. I’m watching the final episode of the BBC miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth, which was a Doctor Who spinoff that often played like The X-Files trying to flirt with Gossip Girl. And at the end of this miniseries, one of the main characters sacrifices his own grandson to save billions of other lives from annihilation by aliens and I know, it sounds a bit silly when you say details like that out loud, but by the time the credits roll I have been ugly-crying utter buckets.

Because my three month-old son was asleep in my arms at the time.

Now while it had occurred to me before that the birth of my son meant my life had forever changed, the fact that it changed in this very specific way—that my ability to tolerate narrative violence committed against fictional children had been demolished—that was something I hadn’t expected. It’s not that I hadn’t cried before, I’d watched the first 15 minutes of Up, but that sort of full-bodied, fisherman’s-widow, James Van Der Beek sobbing? That was new to me.

Tears require context, and they require interpretation by an audience.

One child cries and it is adorable; another child cries and it is obnoxious. One athlete cries tears of joy and is lauded for enthusiasm; another cries in defeat and is pilloried for weakness. The tears of public servants have ended their careers. The tears of white women have gotten Black men killed. A woman refuses to weep as she relates under penalty of perjury the story of her decades-past assault and she is labeled a fabricator. A man snarls and weeps with table-pounding indignance and receives a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Tears have been signifiers of dignity, of integrity, of vulnerability, of empathy. Or they have simply been signifiers of an onion being diced in the room, of an eyelash getting stuck behind the contact lens. Each of these things have been true at one time or another but rarely are they true at the same time. It is the chaos inherent in tears that makes them so powerful. Blood cannot do that. Sweat cannot do that. I still don’t know the difference between black and yellow bile but I don’t think they can do that either.

I called my dad four days ago to wish him a happy birthday. He’s 79 this year. He didn’t remember it was his birthday, and when I call he often needs to be reminded of who I am. This has been a situation in lengthy decline, and while it nonetheless leaves me melancholy it rarely makes me cry.

But that was Friday.

Tomorrow it may be different.

I don’t know, and neither do you.

Respect that.