Why Do We Cry?

We live through chain of emotions. Our very existence is based on emotions. Without emotions, we will be reduced to machines or low life forms, as we think those are. Humans are intelligent beings. We have minds and brains with infinite storage capacity along with instantaneous Retrieval and Replay mode. We can relive past. We can plot and live in future. We can do so through medium of emotions and express the feelings externally as smile, laugh, wonder, anger, hate, anguish and so on but when our emotions are most intense we “CRY’.

If one tries to analyze personal incidences of crying, then one would realize crying is very inner and very personal expression of one’s emotions.  You will not cry no matter how the grim situation may be unless you associate yourself with the situation. You cry when you place yourself in the heart-touching scenario. You cry most of the times when you feel that it could have been you or somebody very close to yourself.  You cry when you are helpless and cannot soothe pains of your loved one.

You may hear about very sad, disheartening incidence, but you will find you are not crying. However, somebody else is crying inconsolably on hearing the same story. You do not cry because you are not connected and the other person is.  

Here is a sad story. Parents had to consent amputation of their daughter’s leg as that was the only remedy available to control spread of the cancer she was suffering from. Till then, their daughter was thinking that come what may, she had her parents to protect her, save her. That day she realized that even her parents cannot help her. That day those parents cried. They cried not because their daughter was going to lose her leg but because their daughter had lost faith in them.

Lord Alfred Tennyson in his poem ‘Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead’ says “She must weep or she will die”. Warrior’s widow is not crying even on seeing her dead husband’s body but she wept when “set his child upon her knees”.

I read this heart touching poem on internet ‘I went to a party, Mom’. The poem is about young girl who went to a party and did not drink because her Mom told her so, but on the way back after the party was over, she gets knocked down by a boy who chose to drink and drive. At the end, the dying girl said that she wanted her mom to know that she didn’t drink, but why was she punished?

Then there are wars stories, stories about plane crashes, car or train accidents, Tsunamis and cancer patients. There are stories about personal tragedies and untimely deaths but there will be stories which will make you cry and there will be some that may just make you sad.