“Tears beget tears,” my grandmother would scold us, whenever one of us felt our throats tighten and our eyes tingle. My little sister Lilly, who was only four years old, hadn’t caught the disease yet, and we were all urged not to cry in front of her – a rule I broke on her sixth birthday.
My grandmother said she’d caught the
curse from an old gypsy woman on the edge of the forest near her
house. She’d peeked through the fence and seen a lip oozing blood
and eyes oozing salt water. When the woman noticed her staring, she
wiped her cheeks and turned away.
“You don’t want to see this,
child,” she hissed. “You’ll catch –“
But it was too late. My grandmother’s
eyes were already welling.
My mother didn’t catch it until she
was eight – my grandmother cut her finger in the kitchen, and let
down her guard. My mother passed it on to me when I was seven.
Despite her best efforts, she was undone by a phone call late one
evening. A sombre voice on the other end delivered bad news and
before my mother had time to turn away, I’d seen the streams making
their way down her cheeks.
When my
grandmonther died, there was no point in hiding the tears. We’d all
caught the curse years ago. We stood by her grave together, weeping.
Tears ran down my sister’s face, onto her belly – where her
unborn daughter rested. We would try to protect her, of course, but
we all knew it was only a matter of time.
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