About Crying Over Astronauts
When I was younger, I prided myself at not being a cryer. I didn't cry at movies, didn't cry over songs or commercials, except that one Sarah McLachlan did for the ASPCA. Crying in front of other people felt like an indignity, an unwelcome confession of vulnerability. To cry in public was to admit that I didn't have control of myself, and I very much wanted control.
If I could pinpoint the moment I started to become a cryer it would be in early 2007, as I stood in the shithole apartment I'd just moved into after a break-up, listening to Lucinda Williams sing "Are You Alright?" Not long after, the Cure's "Pictures of You" provoked a similar outpouring.
But I didn't turn into a full-fledged cryer until about five years later, when my then-fiancé had to undergo a double-lung transplant. For months he'd been walking around hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. I saw the way people stared, and hated every last one of them. But in the wake of the transplant, so many people, in and outside the hospital, extended us kindness, and that is what finally, irretrievably pushed me over the edge. Since then, any show of human compassion has carried the potential to quietly break me.
I think my proclivity is also just a function of growing older and seeing how the world works, or more frequently doesn't. And that's more or less why I found myself weeping this morning over a video of the Artemis II astronauts requesting to name a crater on the moon in memory of Carroll Wiseman, the wife of astronaut Reid Wiseman. Carroll Wiseman died of cancer in 2020. She was only 46 and left behind her husband and two daughters. While making his request to ground control, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen grew emotional, as did the other astronauts. By the time they all hugged, I had a face full of snot.
I was texting with my friend Lauren about this, about how we've both been crying over the astronauts. "[S]eeing men cry and demonstrate emotion!?!? Like, brilliant, brilliant humble men? As opposed to every single asshole we have to be subject to," she wrote by way of explanation for our shared emotion. But there's also something about watching people hundreds of thousands of miles away from home work together harmoniously and in the name of science, progress, and humanity that is inherently very moving. Many people have said that the mission embodies the best of us, and perhaps the real reason I'm crying is because back here on Earth, the best of us seem to be constantly losing to the worst of us (see: every single asshole), who are determined to make things worse for (almost) all of us. Crying won't solve that, but it does provide catharsis, a word that I didn't really understand back when I was a militant non-cryer.
Sometimes, my mother used to tell me, you just need a good cry. Perhaps one of the best and worst parts of getting older and marginally wiser is understanding why.
What I'm consuming this week:
Reading: I just started Emily Nemens's Clutch and it's a good old-fashioned page turner.
Watching: Season 2 of Your Friends and Neighbors. I still can't decide if I actually like this show or if it's more that I'll watch Jon Hamm in anything.
Listening: Stereolab, "Lo Boob Oscillator."
