Mona Siddiqui - 05/10/2026

Available for over a year

There are some things we can say only when our voices begin to break. Last week, following Dame Esther Rantzen’s death, Rebecca Wilcox paid tribute to her mother. During the broadcast, she noted that her mother would have disliked her tearing up, remembering her endless capacity for joy and laughter. And earlier in the week during his speech at the Labour Party conference, the prime minister Andy Burnham struggled to hold back his tears as he spoke about his father. Many at the conference were visibly moved. Two different people, two different kinds of public life, but connected by something as profoundly ordinary as grief. We’re often uncomfortable with tears, especially in public. I think it’s because we’re uncomfortable with vulnerability. We wipe them away, apologise for them as if expressing deep feelings is a social embarrassment. We’re told that to be strong you have to stay composed, in control. I saw this in my own mother when my father became ill - a few tears at the beginning but then her pain remained largely hidden from us. Like many women of her generation, she spent so much of her life holding herself together. I don’t want to romanticise tears, they don’t in themselves make us kinder or more virtuous. They don’t settle political arguments or prove that someone is right or more caring. But they can remind us of something else - that beneath our titles, our arguments and our public identities, its love and loss which make us human. We may disagree about politics, religion or the kind of society we want, but we know what it is to miss a parent. And tears aren’t a failure of faith. In the Qur’an Jacob weeps for Joseph until ` his eyes become white with grief.’ But he didn’t carry his sadness alone, ‘I only complain of my suffering and my grief to God.’ and when the Prophet wept at the death of his son, some were surprised and asked, ` even you a messenger of God?’ But for him tears were God’s mercy placed in our hearts. I find it strange that we aren’t embarrassed by anger even hate in public life but seeing someone cry can make us feel awkward, even ashamed. But perhaps the issue is that we dislike what tears might reveal – that none of us is as in control as we tell ourselves. And that sometimes showing such emotion in public isn't a loss of dignity, but a refusal to pretend that nothing hurts.