crying

when is the last time you cried?

it's jimmy v week in honor of the late basketball coach over at espn and i happened to catch an airing of jimmy v giving his famous speech from 1993. (ESPN aired the speech in its entirety to kick off the week in which they will collect money for the jimmy v foundation, which was created by valvano and raises money for cancer research.) http://jimmyv.org/

in the speech, valvano suggests we should all laugh, think and cry every day. laughing made a lot of sense to me. yes, i should laugh every day. (so should you.) as for thinking, well, of course. but when valvano suggested we should all cry, every day, i was taken aback. cry? every day?

i haven't cried in months. there was a time when i cried too much. it was in my late 20s when i came to grips with my childhood. it seemed in those days i wanted to talk about it all the time, to just about anyone. and when i did, invariably i became emotional. perhaps more importantly, eventually, i got over it. i guess i considered those things enough to where i gained some understanding and some closure.

now, years removed from that time, i find i rarely cry. and i am happy about that. i feel good. i am actually happy i went through that time of sad reflection and believe it helped me to arrive at this place wherein i rarely, if ever, cry.

so i watched valvano's speech, and of course, i know the story. less than two months after making the speech on the espy's, announcing the creation of his foundation to raise money to fight cancer, jimmy v succumbed to the disease.

at one point during his speech, valvano lets everyone know that he is getting a 30 seconds warning from the teleprompter and he mocks it. he says he has tumors all over his body and implies that he simply can't be bothered by this warning to rap it up.

this revelation snuck up on me. i had never seen the entire speech before. when he said it, i gulped. and, i thought about it. i thought about this man being so stoic that he is determined to fight right up to the very last second and he has made a conscious decision to do it by raising money. i thought about him standing there, bravely telling an auditorium of mostly famous people that his body is wracked with cancer. my entire neck felt like it had cancer in that moment because it swelled up and felt thick and clotted and incapable of moving blood or saliva or anything else. i was so choked up i thought it might happen then and there. i thought i would cry.

and nowadays when i feel on the verge of crying, i think myself weak. in my late 20s when i cried so easily, i thought myself strong for crying. now i think myself strong for refusing to cry. it is a strange paradox, really.

it would not feel healthy to me anymore to cry every day. formerly, it was a part of a healing process. now, i am a man, in the sense of, i have a wife and children. i have bills and work. if i cried often, my confidence to handle the various aspects of my life would be challenged. i require a certain amount of bravado, now.

still, have you seen valvano's speech? have you ever heard someone say their body is riddled with cancerous tumors. if you ever do hear words similar to those, you will probably cry if just a little.