[00:00.86]The Crying Place 伤心之地 [00:06.55]In the early ’60s, when I was fourteen years old [00:10.64]and living in a small town in southern Indiana, my father died. [00:15.96]While my mother and I were out of town visiting relatives, [00:19.57]an unexpected and very sudden heart attack took him. [00:23.84]We returned home to find that he was gone. [00:27.12]No chance to say “I love you” or even “Good-bye”. He was just gone, forever. [00:34.01]With my older sister going away to college, our home went from a bustling, [00:39.82]happy family of four to a house where two stunned people lived in quiet grief. [00:45.50]I struggled terribly with the pain and loneliness of my loss, [00:49.59]but I was also very worried about my mother. [00:52.84]I feared that if she saw me crying for my father, her pain would be even more intense. [00:58.41]And, as the new “man” of the house, [01:01.62]I felt a responsibility to protect her from greater hurt. [01:05.20]So I devised a plan that would allow me to grieve without causing more pain for my mother. [01:11.98]In our town, people took the trash from their houses out to large barrels [01:17.74]in the alleys behind their backyards. [01:20.18]There, it would be burned or picked up by the trash men once a week. [01:25.54]Every evening after dinner, I would volunteer to take out the trash. [01:30.30]I would rush around the house with a bag, [01:33.58]collecting scraps of paper or whatever else I could find, [01:38.28]and then go out to the alley and put it in the trash barrel. [01:41.74]I’d hide in the shadows of the dark bushes, [01:44.94]and that’s where I would stay until I had cried myself out. [01:49.07]After recovering enough to be certain that my mother couldn’t tell what I’d been doing, [01:54.10]I would return to the house and get ready for bed. [01:57.71] This subterfuge went on for weeks. [02:01.43]One evening after dinner, when it was time for chores, [02:04.17]I collected trash and went out to my usual hiding place in the bushes. [02:09.28]I didn’t stay very long. [02:11.06]When I returned to the house, [02:13.77]I went to find my mother to ask if she needed me to do anything else. [02:17.62]After searching through the entire house, I finally found her. [02:22.44]She was in the darkened basement, behind the washer and dryer, crying by herself. [02:27.69]She was hiding her pain, to protect me. [02:31.52]I’m not sure which is greater: [02:34.09]the pain you suffer openly or the pain you endure alone to protect someone you love. [02:39.18]I do know that on that night, in the basement, [02:43.00]we held each other and poured out the misery [02:45.74]that had driven us both to our separate, lonely, crying places. [02:48.58]And we never felt the need to cry alone again.

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