No crying

Long break from blogging.
Having spent a couple of weeks in a cancer hospital, as a visitor, one thing that struck me was how alien to our culture crying is.
Every visitor leaving the centre had a fixed stare and red-rimmed eyes. Every patient was battling fear and despair. If ever there was a place where people should be allowed to cry, this was it. But if people did it, they hid it - drew curtains around the bed, hid in the loo, dashed for the security of their car in the car park. Or they suppressed it - made loud jokes, too loud sometimes for the other patients, or huddled outside in the wind and rain smoking cigarettes.
Why can't we cry in public?
Is it fear of upsetting other people who seem to be coping?
Or fear of being seen as not coping?
Or is it just habit, so firmly ingrained since childhood, that we no longer know how to cry without guilt or shame and treat it like a secret vice, worse than smoking or joking or choking down hidden distress?
And if so, could this history of choked back tears be a kind of cancer in itself, or even an element of the disease?
I think we should change.
Maybe in a generation or two, we will.
In the meantime, I hid in the loo, waited till night and howled under the duvet, and phoned friends from secluded corners of the hospital premises where no one would see or hear tears.
And kidded myself I was doing it out of consideration for everyone else.