.005 | WHEN YOU’RE TEARING YOUR HAIR OUT
“SOME PEOPLE DON’T lose their hair,” I protested.
“You’re right,” The Queen responded. “But with your chemo regimen, you’ll lose it all.”
“Sooner or later?”
“Day seventeen,” she decreed.
Something about the way she said day seventeen set off an internal stopwatch. I longed for her to be more vague, more optimistic.
When the shock waves faded, I hunted for wig stores online. One promised the finest quality, another competitive pricing. It was too much. The levees broke, releasing tidal waves of tears. I slammed the laptop closed and scurried away.
The emotional response to losing my hair seemed disproportionate. I’d been diagnosed, undergone surgery to insert a port, bottomed out during chemotherapy, yet I had never wept like this. Where is this coming from? Why am I so tender about losing something that can grow back?
As a young girl, I stood on the deck of my parents’ sailboat. A stranger strolled by on the dock. He waved and greeted me, “Hey, little boy!” My mom had given me a short haircut just days before.
At four years old, I knew few things to be true. Among them, my name was Margaret, and I was a girl. The innocent words of a passerby cracked the emerging foundations of my identity. I ran to my mother bawling. Fragile and shaken, I assessed that without long hair, I was unidentifiable. I was neither Margaret nor a girl.
From that day forward, I refused to allow my mom to cut my hair short. My curly amber locks cascaded to my shoulders in a litany of goofy school pictures from elementary school through college. (That reminds me. I need to have a bonfire.) Just before I met Leif, I gave into a kind, persistent stylist who wanted to trim my hair to a bob. Through Leif’s loving encouragement, the style transitioned to a pixie cut.
The thought of losing my hair excavated deep scars of fear, fragility, and confusion. My hair, a central building block of my identity, was about to be plucked from me. I wanted to run to my mom and sob in her arms.
I shared the memory with a handful of friends. Something about confessing deep pain to others helped me heal. I refused to let sorrow steal my joy. Not this early in the fight.
After a series of measured breaths, I mustered the gumption to return to my laptop and search for cranial hair prostheses, the fancy term for a wig. A salon with a wide selection was only fifteen minutes away from our home in Colorado. I zipped over and perused the aisles, trying on various hairdos.
One made me look like the twin of a close friend. I snapped a photo to send her. Maybe some red locks would make me look like Amy Adams? Not so much. What about some bead-adorned dreadlocks? Fun, but not me.
The owner of the salon, Abby, asked if I wanted a consultation about different types of hair systems.
We discussed options and settled on an auburn hairpiece. She needed several days to wash and prepare the wig for the fitting. At the register, Abby confessed that she, too, was a survivor. As she shared her story, I discovered I had wandered into the one store where the hairstylist just happened to be a twenty-two-year survivor of the same exact cancer—something that rarely happens.
God’s goodness and provision were unmistakable.
During the first days in Maine, I’d noticed extra hairs in the shower, but by the last night in that white claw-foot bathtub, the tresses fell in thick clumps. By the time I arrived home, I was patting down my head as if to tell the strands to stay put every day. Yet they fell everywhere. Stray hairs appeared all over my pillow, even on my dinner plate. One afternoon, I glanced down at Hershey nestled on my lap. Instead of finding dog hair on me, I had shed all over the dog.
My scalp throbbed. No one told me to expect pain. The touch of my head against the pillow evoked a sharp twinge. I attempted to sleep facedown—an impossible task. The slightest gust of wind incited agony as locks fluttered away.
By fateful day seventeen, I could no longer cling to my strands. Sitting in Abby’s chair, I examined my scalp. Much of my hair dislodged from the follicle and barely held on.
“Are you ready?” Abby asked, gripping a buzzing pair of hair clippers.
“Wait,” I said. “Can I pull it out?”
“Sure. I’ll give you a minute.”
I can’t pinpoint what spurred the desire. At the hospital I was a willing subject for poking, prodding, and poisoning. Perhaps this was the only opportunity where I could hold the reins of my suffering. I refused to let it pass.
Lifting my hand, I grasped a tuft just above my forehead. I felt the follicles give. Clumps dropped to the ground. The slightest tug removed handfuls of hair. The process did not carry physical pain anymore, but each pull provided an emotional release.
Until this moment, I never considered the role hair plays in the expression of emotion. People touch, comb, or braid each other’s hair as a sign of affection or companionship. In India, an age-old expression translates, “I grew so frustrated, I plucked the hair off my head.” In America, we use a similar phrase: wanting to “tear our hair out.”
As the tresses amassed at my feet, my mind wandered to the Nazirites, who shaved their head as a sign of dedication to God, and then to the Old Testament prophets Ezra and Jeremiah, for whom plucking hair was an expression of mourning.
The furor of my medical treatment left little time for grieving the innumerable losses. My limited energy reserves were dedicated to enduring, persevering, inching forward on scraped-up elbows through the dark tunnel that lay ahead. Yet in a salon chair I stumbled into a grace-filled moment of mourning.
The hairs abandoned their posts until my feet were buried. When the tresses stopped tumbling, only a thin coverage remained.
“You can shave now.”
The prongs of the razor felt cool against my scalp. Staring in the mirror, I watched a stranger emerge. When Abby finished, only a stubby layer of peach fuzz remained. I inspected my head, searching for a hidden giraffe-shaped birthmark or a long-forgotten scar from childhood. No such luck.
If I had to be bald, I determined to become a classy bald. What I didn’t realize that day, and would only learn through others, is the secret gift of losing one’s hair: it highlights a person’s most beautiful features.
We all have moments when we want to tear our hair out. Maybe you’ve never yanked hair from your crown, but you have encountered situations where your children or your spouse or your boss or your parents made you want to pull out your hair. Exasperated, you would do anything to regain control, even for a sliver of time.
When everything goes awry, we are tempted to rush past, stuff, deny, or file the situation under “unmentionables.” We will do anything to make the chaos subside. Something inside us lunges to grieve, but we stiff-arm the impulse, forcing ourselves to keep it together.
I knew I needed to mourn, but I struggled to allow the tears to flow. I had committed to fight back with joy. Wasn’t bereavement the antithesis of joy? Stumbling across the words of Jesus in one of his most famous sermons, I spotted something I’d never noticed.
Unlike Matthew, who describes Jesus ascending a mountain to address the people, Luke places Jesus in the center of the crowd. He steps among the mentally ill, those crippled by infirmity, people barely hanging on to life. Rubbing elbows with those who have diseases and unclean spirits, Jesus tells them to consider themselves blessed:
“You are blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning.”
The Greek word for “blessed” is makarios and can be translated “happy” or “fortunate.” Jesus describes the down-and-out as the lucky ones. Such words seem counterintuitive. After all, tears are often seen as a sign of weakness—the crinkly white flag of giving up. Jesus declares that those strong enough to allow the sobs to escape are among the fortunate. The Son of God gives the quivering permission to mourn.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. Many of Israel’s prophets were poets. Their stark words evoked weeping. Those tears provided a pathway to relinquishment. Through mourning, the people released the way things were so they could embrace how things might be. They traded their exasperation for expectation.
A friend of mine talks about grief and the process of mourning as if it’s a river. He points out that there’s more to a river than meets the eye. The river’s current smooths the rough edges of stones and provides an outlet for fish to travel to mating grounds. Biochemical processes degrade and decompose organic waste. The rushing water flushes away debris.
So it is with the river called mourning. If you poke your head beneath the rippled surface, you see deposits being washed away that long needed to be released. Sometimes the river rushes unexpectedly, knocking you off your feet; other times it laps gently around your ankles. And if you pause long enough, you discover small treasures worthy of pocketing.
My friend’s image awakened me to a truth I suspect Jesus knew:
Mourning is a river that carries us to joy.
Sometimes we need to give space for grief in order to make room for joy. No one is immune to sorrow, and only those who learn to grieve well can recapture the healing it brings. Just as light needs darkness, so joy needs grief. And just as night precedes morning, so joy comes in the mourning.
My visit to the salon revealed a deep desire to mourn well. The process of mourning is like a long exhale. Expelling sorrow can feel like it’s emptying us of life, but it’s crucial to breathing joy more deeply.
No longer in Abby’s chair, I struggled to unleash the anguish stirring inside. My emotions bounced like lottery balls of shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Expressions of mourning came in unpredictable fits and spurts. I wondered if, like the decision to pull out my hair, I could find a way to mourn with more intentionality.
I decided to return to my Jewish roots.
In studying ancient Hebrew mourning rites, I stumbled upon knowledge that would bring comfort for my soul—symbolic actions to practice, as well as guidelines for how to grieve. These practices provided a “theology in action,” a way to turn my face toward God in life’s most impoverished moments.
The first discoveries pertained to instructions on how to treat someone whose death is imminent. Such a person is to be honored with the same respect, decency, and privileges of a healthy person until the final exhale. Anyone facing adversity longs not to be seen as excluded or reduced in any way.
One of the most painful aspects of my diagnosis was that people, including my closest friends, were already viewing me as long gone. Sometimes I wanted to shriek, “I’m not dead yet!” but feared my words would be mistaken for a bad Monty Python joke.
After a meal with a group of friends, I carried plates from the dining room into the kitchen.
“You go sit,” one of my friends snapped. “You shouldn’t be doing that!”
Though I am confident she meant well, her words stung.
I know I don’t have to and maybe shouldn’t be doing this, but that is why I am. I have calculated every last bit of energy this action will extract from my body and deemed it worthy because, for a fraction of a second, life will feel normal again.
I conjured a smile. “I’m a big girl. I got this.”
My friends had good intentions, but I preferred when they asked what I needed rather than assumed they knew best. Those interactions preserved rather than diminished my dignity. The question, “What would you prefer?” breathed life into my brittle bones and, in a strange way, issued the freedom to sit back and let someone else clear the dishes.
After the time of death and before the burial, Jewish custom acknowledges a period of mourning known as aninut, or “deep grief.” These precious hours, often limited because the Torah teaches Jews to bury their dead quickly, are set aside for the immediate family to focus on one task: the burial ceremony.
Reading about this time of deep grief helped me understand that Leif and I were feeling the same natural, physiological response to hardship experienced by humans throughout history. The pangs from trauma, confusion, loss, and dread were normal. Life grew dark and filmy. Something would have been wrong if it did not feel that way.
Jewish culture carved space for these grainy moments. They set apart time for those who experienced great loss to grieve without hesitation or apology. The rites barricaded others from placing expectations or burdens on the aggrieved, thus protecting both the mourning people and the mourning process.
Aninut whispered to me that these times of deep mourning were healthy and necessary. With aninut, the demands of everyday life could fall to the wayside. The noisy list of shoulds hushed silent, allowing me to focus on tending the loss.
The unique act of ripping one’s garments performed before a Jewish funeral offered something to emulate in the mourning process. The practice of keriah, or “tearing,” has deep biblical roots. Jacob tears his cloak when he hears the false report of his son Joseph’s death, and David rends his garments when he learns of Saul’s death.
Within Jewish custom, keriah has its own liturgy. The officiating rabbi of the funeral makes a starter cut on the lapel of the jacket or shirt of immediate family members with scissors or a razor. Then the mourners recite the following:
Adonai our God,
Ruler of the universe,
the Judge of truth.
Those select syllables carry weight. Despite the painful loss, mourners bless God and acknowledge his sovereignty even in the wake of calamity. This prayer isn’t spoken with levity or ease, but rather acknowledges the supremacy of God’s perspective. Even when his judgments don’t make sense, God remains the only true Judge.
After these difficult syllables are spoken, the mourners rip the fabric of their garments. The dramatic act provides a sanctioned expression of pain and anger, a symbolic declaration, “My world and heart are torn apart by this loss.” The tradition validates the spectrum of emotions felt by the bereaved, including guilt, anger, frustration, and confusion.
Following the tearing of the cloth, mourners recite Job’s words after he loses his children, livestock, servants, and wealth in a single day:
God has taken.
Blessed be the name.
Tears welled as I reflected on these words. The beauty of the practice overtook me. I had discovered a sanctioned expression of pain and anger, emotions that most adults I knew had mastered the art of muting.
Some take the Mad Men approach, numbing the pain with martinis, nicotine, or pills. Others resort to religiosity as if saying God’s name with two syllables increases its potency. Still others forge agony and fury into weapons, pointing them like six-shooters at unsuspecting sales clerks, fellow drivers, or worse, their close friends or family members. At one time or another, I tried all the above. None seemed to work well.
One afternoon when the house sat quiet, I slipped into our bedroom and closed the door. Clutching a pair of scissors, I thumbed through my closet looking for a garment to rend. I yanked it off the hanger and pulled the shirt over my head.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, lights off, I paused before speaking:
Blessed are You,
Adonai our God,
Ruler of the universe,
the Judge of truth.
I did not feel like offering a blessing, but chose to anyway. Only after the words left my lips did they feel good or right. The word “our” reminded me that I was not suffering alone. Such anguish has plagued humanity for millennia. Perhaps one day, my pain would also become a salve to others.
I snipped a short incision on the collar of the shirt. A gentle pull on both corners of the tear split the shirt with a slow rrrrrrriiiipppping sound.
Then I turned to the words of Job:
God has given.
God has taken.
Blessed be the name.
Maybe it was my imagination, but something dislodged in my communication with God. A blockage to him was replaced with a newfound tenderness. In this prayer, in this act, I had somehow become more honest than ever with my pain and anger.
My garment rent, I sat half-naked in the darkness, mended in some mysterious way.
Throughout the next few months, I returned to this ancient practice many times. I tore my garments in the wake of heartbreaking test results, in the aftermath of torturous treatments, at the discovery of a medical blunder by a nurse, at the sight of more than a dozen rugged scars across my chest.
The more we strive to hold everything together, the more we fall apart. But when we release and learn to mourn, we discover the truth Jesus promised: “You are blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning.”
What do you need to grieve? What is damming up the cleansing river of mourning inside you?
Betrayal? Disappointment? Heartbreak? Divorce? The suicide that shocked everyone?
Sometimes we sweep away opportunities to grieve by convincing ourselves the loss is no big deal or if we ignore the loss, it will vanish. They never do. Some of the losses that need the most grieving took place decades ago. When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve well, something inside us dies. Our bandwidth for feeling narrows and emotional signals seem to fade. We may not feel as much pain, but we also don’t feel as much joy.
Our spiritual vitality depends on our ability to mourn the notable losses in life—the death of a loved one, infertility, miscarriage, childhood abuse. But it also depends on our willingness to mourn those tucked away by time and circumstance. Sometimes the quieter losses prove to be the most important—the move to a new town, the unmet expectation you’ve never said aloud, the unrealized dream that haunts you when you can’t sleep.
Just as keriah encourages Jewish mourners to voice the unspeakable to God, so, too, must we find those spaces and places where we can bear our broken souls to the only One who brings healing.
Where is that space for you? Maybe you need to take some time to find that place of honesty and speak freely to God.
Or perhaps you need to find a grief partner, someone to gently remind you to let it all out. Who will support you in your bid for new life?
Maybe you need to write a lament of mourning or find a garment in your closet and give it a good old-fashioned rip before God.
Life’s demands pull us away from mourning, so we must ferret out nooks and crannies of time in which to allow the tears, the emotions, the hair to fall. Some of those moments arrive at appointed times—the funeral, the boss’s office, the flip of a cold pillow in the middle of the night. Sometimes we must create them like the rending of clothes or like one woman I know who held a funeral for her breasts. And sometimes we need to embrace the restorative nature of mourning when it comes.
Pockets of mourning soon surfaced throughout my day. I wept in the movie theater during a matinee. The dam of tears broke as I watched the sun beam its final vibrant shadows over the mountains. They flowed during times of study and reflection, on daily hikes, in the darkness of the bedroom. Many mornings Leif and I nestled on the couch engaged in the gravest conversations any couple can have. All too often our words turned to weeping, as we lay in each other’s arms.
All those tears were cleansing me. This grieving was washing away my secondhand priorities, reservoirs of ingratitude embedded in my soul, strongholds of immaturity that should have disappeared long ago. Through the passageway of tears, I was able to reawaken to life’s beauty.
Indeed, grieving may last for the night, but joy doesn’t only wait for the morning—it comes in the mourning too. Much like the sky holds both the sun and moon, our lives are comprised of both sorrow and joy. In some seasons, we will see more of one than the other. Like a solar eclipse, a life fully lived will encompass both.
Adversity invites us to mourn. Such grieving demands a level of vulnerability that can make us want to run, hide, and avoid the outpouring. When done well, the tears of mourning become a river that washes away our pain, a holy stream carrying us toward healing, wholeness, and joy.
Having embraced mourning, I now needed to learn how to celebrate while suffering. No one could have guessed what that would require of me.