(no subject)

[elizabeth]

I am trying to believe that the fact that Elizabeth Edwards's memoir just brought me to tears is a good thing; for so long I have been convinced that I am an emotional cripple when it comes to grief. I don't cry easily. I did not weep when my grandfather died, nor when I fled my father. The last time I remember crying was both in anger and in grief -- no, that is not true. I cried myself to sleep a few months ago when a friend of mine (and my father's) upset me by pushing me to reconsider my stance on him. The time before that was, god, months before, when I asked my mother why my father had gone back on a promise to take me to France when I was thirteen. I had never known why, and when I finally found out, I cried that night, so hard I couldn't breathe, almost a decade late.

Maybe now I am comfortable enough with my own anger and my own capacity for grief in a way I have never been. Maybe that means that my empathy, always stifled, is something I can express now. I don't know, but that's okay.

Reposted from IJ, 16 March 2009