SOUL + BODY: When You Have Nothing to Give but Your Tears

About six years ago, in a children's cemetery near the legendary city of Carthage in Tunisia, North Africa, a guide mentioned that mothers used to collect their tears and embed them in the tombstones as a sign of grief and mourning. It seemed a rather fanciful tale, certainly more legend that fact. It was hard to imagine mothers - or anyone else - scooping up teardrops as they rolled down their cheeks and chins.
For some reason that story stayed with me, and a few days ago, in a museum in Syria, I saw a glass case that displayed combs, jewelry, and 2,000-year-old tear vials. A few of the two- to four-inch-high receptacles were sculpted from clay and looked like tiny vases; most were made from blown glass. They were beautiful and graceful but unadorned. A sign noted that the vials - lachrymatories - were used by mourners and brought to the cemeteries.
So the guide in Carthage had been right after all. It seems that lachrymatories were first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Psalms 56:8) and were fairly common in Roman times. The more tears that flowed into vials, the more valued the departed was thought to be. Sometimes, during a mourning procession, women were even paid to cry into the tiny vessels, and the more tears they wept, the better their remuneration.
Lachrymatories made a comeback during the Victorian era, but the nineteenth-century versions had special stoppers that allowed the tears to evaporate. When the vials were dry, the mourning period was considered to be over.
Lachrymatories make sense to me. When someone suffers a grievous loss - when the fullness of someone's presence becomes the barrenness and loneliness of an empty bed or crib, a forlorn armchair, an unused place setting at a dinner table - there is often little else to do but sob. How wonderful to collect tears and then bring them to the cemetery to leave with the interred as a bond, a communication, a sincere expression of how much they are missed. A tear vial is both highly symbolic and highly personal and tangible. The griever has an opportunity to express herself and, if there is consciousness after death, the departed will know that he is missed.
I've heard that glass artists around the world are starting to make lachrymatories again. If it's true, I'm buying.
Judith Fein