Tears and Healthy Healing

There have been some things happening in my life over the last couple of weeks that have been challenging, to say the least … perhaps straight up difficult would be a better description. My emotions have been anything but stable (picture a super ball ricocheting around an enclosed space of all hard surfaces). There have been a lot of tears, almost all of them mine.

If you’ve read Clandestiny, you know about my general aversion to crying. If you haven’t, let me just say I’ve gone from a position of hating to cry and avoiding it at all costs, to realizing that it’s normal, healthy and needed — and still not liking it. But during one of my crying spells last week there seemed to be a little door that opened in my mind and heart that gave me a new view.

Did you know that in many hospitals, when they do a fairly major surgery – say, fixing a broken hip – they no longer suture the wound closed on the operating table?  Instead they leave at least a portion of it open in order to allow it to drain, thus allowing the body to push out any infection trying to stay inside. My husband and I had a personal experience with that thirteen years ago when they surgically rebuilt his right foot. They put gauze on the wound and put the foot in a plaster cast, but it continued to ooze enough so that within a couple of days the cast was showing the signs as the fluids seeped through.

Anyway, as I lay in my bed last week, with tears rolling down my cheeks, I realized that basically what was happening was my mental and emotional wound was oozing, and the outlet was my eyes. Could it be that God designed it that way so that what was causing my grief wouldn’t fester into bitterness or repressed anger?

I did a little research on tears and this is some of what I found: there are three distinct types of tears. Basal tears supply moisture and act as a lubricant for our eyes. Reflex tears are the ones that happen when something gets in our eyes that is an irritant, such as sand, dust or the fumes from an onion. But emotional tears have a higher protein content and contain hormones, including prolactin and adrenocorticotropic, that the other two don’t. If you want to know more, I found this information on a site called Very Well Health, in an article by Dr. Bedinghaus from January 8, 2020.

Looking a little further, I ended up on a site called Quora.com where I saw photos of different types of tears that were taken by Rose-Lynn Fisher. I found those absolutely fascinating.

All of this leads me to believe that our Creator designed our tears of sorrow or grief to be able to cleanse our bodies physically, mentally and emotionally. If we suture that outlet closed, as I did for so many years, we are closing off an avenue of healing and opening the way for some nasty infections to take hold.

Here’s what I’ve taken from this for myself: when my eyes start to leak, I’m gonna let them.