Dry Tears

The Valley, Silence, and Unexpected Tears

Some years ago, I was sitting alone in the wardroom at Camp David eating lunch when it happened.

CNN was on the television, but I wasn’t paying much attention. Then a familiar face appeared on the screen.

It was Nicholas.

I recognized him immediately, and the tears came without warning.

That surprised me.

By that point in my life, tears were scarce.

In the moment, I struggled to understand my reaction.

Why this story?

Why now?

Why Nicholas?

I don’t remember finding an answer.

But I had seen those faces before.

A few years later, I had a similar experience.

I was visiting the National Museum of the Marine Corps. I had gone specifically to see the newer exhibits related to Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren’t open yet, so I wandered into a small theater tucked away behind a set of doors intentionally made of shattered glass.

The room was dark.

A movie was playing.

Funerals. Burials. Arlington.

I watched quietly until the camera moved across a row of snow-covered headstones.

It was completely unexpected.

It caught me off guard.

It was like a punch in the gut.

I recognized the names immediately.

The names belonged to Special Operations Sailors, not Marines, and I was standing in a Marine Corps museum.

They were part of my story, not the Marine Corps’ story.

Again, the tears came.

Not a flood. Not uncontrollable sobbing. Just tears.

Without warning.

Uninvited.

As though some door I did not know how to open had briefly opened itself and let a little light shine in.

I can think of a handful of moments like that.

My grandmother’s death.

A movie called Taking Chance that I found myself returning to year after year.

Small moments.

Unplanned moments.

Moments when the tears appeared as suddenly as they had vanished.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost them.

I am not entirely sure when.

Looking back, I can point to plenty of places where grief accumulated.

Over the years, the list grew longer.

As a young pastor, I spent two days each week visiting hospitals throughout Shreveport. Most days were routine. Some were not.

More than once I walked into a room expecting a visit and discovered that death had arrived first.

I still remember walking back to a nurses’ station one day and asking a nurse to come with me because something did not seem right.

When we reached the room she looked at the patient, looked back at me, and said, “Honey, something is definitely wrong. She’s gone.”

Years later there would be other deaths.

Funerals.

Notifications.

Hospital rooms.

Families.

The kinds of experiences that become part of a pastor’s life and a chaplain’s life.

I learned to carry them because there was no other choice.

Or maybe I learned to set them aside because there was no other choice.

I’m not sure those are the same thing.

For a long time I assumed I was handling grief because I was still moving forward.

More than that, I thought my practice of ministry was improving.

Ministry felt sharper.

My instincts were better.

I was more comfortable in difficult situations than I had been as a young pastor.

I could walk into hospital rooms, funerals, casualty notifications, and crises with a confidence I did not possess years earlier.

The work continued.

Life continued.

The mission continued.

And in many ways I became more capable.

That is part of what made the tears so confusing.

The grief did not seem to be making me less effective. If anything, the opposite appeared to be true.

Years earlier, while serving in Mortuary Affairs, one of the moments I feared most happened.

The remains belonged to someone I knew.

I still did my job.

Because that was what the moment required.

Years later, a Marine-on-Marine shooting brought that grief much closer again.

This was not somewhere else.

It was my base.

My Marines.

Suddenly, I found myself caring for people on every side of the tragedy.

I carried parts of the story that could not be revealed.

Things I knew.

Things I heard.

Things I could not forget.

I carried it because that was my job.

At least that is what I told myself.

And for a while, I believed it.

Until I couldn’t.

I began losing weight.

At first I didn’t think much of it.

Then the weight kept coming off.

Nearly forty pounds in six weeks.

One day I was walking through the clinic when a flight surgeon stopped me in the hallway.

He wasn’t my doctor.

He simply took one look at me and said, “Come with me.”

He could see it.

The weight loss. The gaunt look. Something wasn’t right.

He wanted blood work.

Diabetes. Cancer.

Anything that might explain what he was seeing.

I told him I already knew what it was.

Grief.

He ran the tests anyway.

And then he suggested that maybe it was time to talk to someone.

Grief is stubborn that way.

Understanding it is not the same thing as escaping it.

Yet every now and then something would happen.

A face on a television.

A name on a headstone.

A movie I had seen before.

And suddenly the tears would return.

As though grief had been waiting patiently in a room I had forgotten existed.

I think about that sometimes when the Psalmist writes about the valley of the shadow of death.

Most people focus on the comfort in that psalm.

I find myself returning to the valley.

Not because I enjoy being there.

But because the Psalmist never pretends the valley does not exist.

The valley is real.

The shadows are real.

The journey through it is real.

For much of my life I thought I was accompanying other people through that valley.

Pastors do that.

Chaplains do that.

We walk with people when they are frightened, grieving, dying, or alone.

What took me longer to understand was that companions walk through the valley too.

Not the same valley.

Not the same grief.

But a valley nonetheless.

The mistake was thinking I was only passing through.

Maybe that is why lament matters.

Not because lament fixes anything.

Not because lament resolves grief.

Certainly not because lament makes the valley disappear.

Lament simply allows us to tell the truth.

It allows us to sit in the muck for a while.

It allows us to acknowledge that grief exists without demanding that it be resolved.

It allows us to keep walking.

I do know that the tears have not fully returned.

Maybe the better question is whether they still come.

And they do.

A face.

A name.

A memory.

A grandmother.

A valley.

And for a moment the water flows again.