Permission to Break: Grieving as a Man
Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash
This essay marks the first essay in a larger project, Dead Reckoning. This project seeks to highlight voices that challenge the American blueprint for manhood—a script built on the paradox that to be a “real man” means to silence our own heart's needs for connection, freedom, and vulnerability. This old script is failing us and needs to be reimagined. Dead Reckoning exists to craft a new set of stories for men—stories that hold space for both the wounds we carry and the wounds we’ve inflicted. It is a place for honesty, reckoning, and the pursuit of a deeper, kinder, stronger and more humane masculinity—one that embraces complexity, confronts pain, refuses to settle for isolation and hatred.
From its beginning, the Bible is a book of loss.
The first human family is evicted from its home in a dispute over forbidden fruit. If that weren’t enough, they are condemned to labor in unyielding soil, bear the weight of shame, propagate at great risk to women’s bodies, live family lives marked by discontent and strain, exist in perpetual conflict with the serpent and its descendants, and ultimately succumb to death.
The Bible is written in a minor key. Despite that fact, American men often feel uneasy around loss. We walk this earth with clenched fists and dry eyes, unaware of the liberating truth that the Bible speaks more often in tears than in thunder.
My two young daughters recently joined me on a visit to the grave of my grandfather, Bing “Tommy” Chan (1921-2006). When I think of all the men in my family, he is among the greatest. He wasn’t perfect, but he was good.
My grandfather left China to build a new life in a strange land, starting a family in a country that often responded to his racial and cultural differences with disregard, hostility and suspicion.
The familiar landmarks of my hometown blurred as I approached the cemetery. As the field of headstones came into view, I could feel the grief take over, causing my eyes to well with tears. I messaged a friend: “I don’t know how to do this.”
In retrospect, I wasn’t entirely certain what “this” was. What was I actually trying to accomplish with this pilgrimage? Was I passing on memories? Hoping for some kind of mystical encounter between my long-dead grandfather and his great grandchildren? Was it about them at all?
I’m not sure I have answers to any of those questions.
Crying is a regular—almost daily—part of my life. But in that moment, I found myself hiding my tears from my two children—my daughters.
Masculinity is a performance. It’s a set of scripts that look different depending upon the stage, the cast, and the audience. When I’m standing on the stage of parenthood, that kind of vulnerability has always been difficult for me. But what am I actually afraid of?
Tears pose a threat to something deep within—something we’re trying to guard. In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller pens the following:
Grief is subversive, undermining our society's quiet agreement that we will behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant, or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed; it cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul.
There it is. To grieve is to hand over control to something primal and unleashed—something we fear. Grief undoes us, and the one thing men don’t have permission to be is undone, especially by grief and especially in the presence of others. Men have permission to be overflowing with fury, consumed by ambition, possessed by sexual desire—but grief must be endured in silence. This hurts everyone.
By denying ourselves access to the halls of grief we also deny ourselves access to what is sacred, healing, and vital. As Oscar Wilde says in De Profundis, “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.”
But in the lonely world of masculinity, it is far better for a man to be numb than to feel. These walls promise safety but deliver only isolation.
Assumed in all of this is the American blueprint for manhood, which contains a cruel paradox: to be a "real man" means to silence our own wild hearts.
This old script needs to be thoroughly rewritten, because our world is in need of a new set of stories for men--stories that hold space for both the wounds we carry and the wounds we've inflicted.
This essay marks the launch of a new project, Dead Reckoning. This website is a space for essays and conversations that challenge the American blueprint for manhood—a script built on the paradox that to be a “real man” means to silence our own heart's needs for connection, freedom, and vulnerability. But this old script is failing us and needs to be reimagined. Dead Reckoning exists to craft a new set of stories for men—stories that hold space for both the wounds we carry and the wounds we’ve inflicted. It is a place for honesty, reckoning, and the pursuit of a deeper, kinder, stronger and more humane masculinity—one that embraces complexity, confronts pain, refuses to settle for isolation and hatred.
