Back beneath diamond-white November sunlight, the sky seems a mockingly bright blue.

My face aches. It feels how I imagine glass on the verge of shattering feels, brittle, rigid. My throat is constricted. I feel this way because I have not been able to cry, because I did what I imagine myself "trained" to be. Today, stoicism hurts.

It hurts because the death of a little girl, a week shy of her first birthday, is so sad, so incomprehensible to me that it demanded tears. And free of its brain, my body might have let rivulets of brine flow from my eyes. Tears brimmed for the duration of the funeral but I would not let them flow.

Some in that dim church cried freely. I heard every wracked sob, felt that staccato male weeping, from the front rows, where the family sat.

But there were many like me, people whom I sensed were bottling it up, obeying old, cruel instincts. Women clutched their partners' arms as if they were life preservers, their eyes red and glistening, but no water issued forth; men with faces as stony as gargoyles', perhaps like me deeply ashamed or fearful of being seen by others in a heartrendingly emotional state, or perhaps terrified (again, like me) of letting go.

I wonder: Do they hurt now, the way I do? Do they feel brittle and bottled and exhausted from the effort of not letting go?

Later, I talk to a friend who reminds me that any reaction to death is acceptable, even not letting go, depending on the day, the person, the death.

"Everybody grieves differently, and it's a continuum," says Kim Mooney, community bereavement coordinator for Hospice of Boulder County. "There are different tasks at different times for people ... The trick is not to tag anybody in any Polaroid moment ... That piece of control (not crying) on that day might be the only thing they have left."

But she acknowledges that there are cultural pressures, old family pressures, that keep some grieving people from release, when release may be the best medicine. She says it would be misguided to admonish those who didn't (couldn't?) cry at the little girl's funeral, including myself.

"But you could invite people to stop and think about what makes them go home with a headache," she says, referring to my body's reaction. "If you are mentally driving your grief like a team of oxen, it's not going to have its natural expression. It will end up in some manifestation of 'stuckness.' For you (me), it's physical: to very stingily let out a few little tears does not serve the function of release, and you get a headache. Somebody else might go home and eat too much chocolate cake, or kick the dog and not know why."

I know I will never be much of a weeper. But if I can come to the place where I can allow tears to flow when they are simply awaiting release, that won't be bad. Scary, but good.

"It is scary," Mooney says, "to see what grief will bring up, what will happen if you start crying. You don't end up with answers or a conclusion, maybe, but instead it may open up a place of no control, of mystery, where there are no answers. And how many of us are willing to hang out there?"

Not many. But sometimes, mystery and tears may be the only answer that makes any kind of sense.