About twice a month, I get a piece of Miss Laura’s mail. It’s been coming for over three years now. Miss Laura was the spinster-lady who lived in my duplex before me until she passed away. Her spinster-sister lived upstairs, and as near as I can glean from stories the neighbors tell, she died about five years before Miss Laura. (Believe me, I do see the irony here. My current upstairs neighbor is also a single woman – but I’m thinking there must be another way out!)
Her sister’s mail has stopped. But Miss Laura’s keeps coming.
There’s no family member to forward the mail to, and so I destroy it. But having collected it for quite a while – I’ve learned things about Miss Laura, even though we never met.
An e-mail from a well-spoken friend contained this phrase I couldn’t stop turning over in my head. She referred to someone she loved crying “the good kind of cry,” and I felt instinctively what those few simple words conveyed.
Some tears are so unbidden, and pure, and necessary that they cleanse and heal, almost without us. Such tears are the essential lubricant for what my friend described as that “good kind of cry”.
They can’t be conjured any more than they can be quieted. They simply are, for as long as they need to be. They aren’t manipulative, or especially dramatic, or perhaps even readily visible. But these tears can speak volumes when words won’t do at all. And they can respond with powerful eloquence when the muscles of our faces or arms or legs are rendered frozen and still.
What a fascinating, marvelous, miraculous creation is the heart! Its muscular right and left chambers continuously pump blood without reminder, as its various valves and vessels skillfully circulate that life-giving fluid. But although it has many parts, the heart functions as a whole, or not at all.
When things go wrong with our physical hearts, they must either be repaired…or replaced. Although some diseased or malfunctioning organs (like a spleen or an appendix) may simply be removed, the heart must stay. And while other ailing parts may be cut away (so that we make-do with only a fraction of them) a man’s heart cannot be divided and remain viable.