‘The Fear’ (2005)
I think it started with my mother–in which case it ultimately began with my father, because it all started with my fear of her death, and that would be his fault. My first memories are from when I was three, but I’m sure it was there long before. I just couldn’t put it into words yet. Then followed many years of me worrying I would come home one day and find things had gone just that little bit too far. Even after he was gone, I worried just the same. Each year she grew older, and I felt time passing, creeping closer to the day when I would inevitably have to say goodbye to her–and I would panic.
‘How will I ever know anything after you’re gone?’ I asked, and she folded me up into her arms just like she always did when I was unhappy (or happy, for that matter), and it just seemed to make it worse (who would fold me into their arms and give me solace when she was no longer around?). The tears were as unceasing as the epiphanies: she taught me literally everything. Whenever an idea or an answer lay just on the tip of my tongue, she was the one who pushed the right words out of my mouth. She was the lone survivor of a family I once happily allowed to slip away from me. She was my link to the past. After her, who could remind me of all the little details of all those stories I think sometimes I found boring but now grew to cling to as the most important treasures I could possess….
‘But why should that worry you so much?’ she asked me in return, and the thought I’d been unconsciously suppressing for so long suddenly overwhelmed me. After all, one day I’ll be gone myself, and then what would I need to know all these things for?
That’s when my fear of death really began.
We all accept it intellectually, but we don’t really believe it. Sure, we philosophise about it all the time. We form it into works of art, turn it into deities and rituals. On the surface, we are so preoccupied with it that an alien would imagine we face death with a brave face. But masking it in these ways distances us from it, and deep down we think it’s something that only happens to other people. The first time it really hit me that I would die, it was like being handed my sentence–like being interrupted prematurely and unfairly–like Kafka’s ‘trial’. When once I was invincible, all in a moment death loomed right around the dark corners.
‘It’s about the fear of the unknown,’ we’re told. ‘We don’t know what happens when we die, and that scares us.’ But maybe it’s more about the ‘known’. Without interpretation, we might just accept death without much thought. But we have all these theories, these explanations, and they are what scare me.
Some people think it’s best to live life in a dreamy haze and pretend there is no death–as long as we are cautious and keep ourselves out of harm’s way, we will live forever, like Tolkien’s elves.
Not me. I need to be prepared, have a game plan. This is why I have imagined my own death endlessly.
***
I’m old–very, very old. I’m not even sure where all the time went, and I think that’s something most people must think when they reach this age. I was so used to seeing myself, day in and day out, I didn’t even realise how much I’d changed until I compared photographs one afternoon. It was shocking.
‘Who is that?’ I asked my friend, looking at one partly blurry picture from two decades earlier.
‘That’s you!’ she laughed, and I could not take my eyes from the image before me. I didn’t believe it was me. I couldn’t identify with it, attach it to myself. The woman was such a different person from myself, I could not help but recall one day when I was practically a child, when my future husband said to me:
‘You change all the time. That in itself is a kind of death. You’re not who you used to be, and this person now will die and become someone new. Maybe that’s what death is like…so what is there to worry about?’
He always stood out to me. He had a way of saying things that made you believe he was the first person ever to have an idea, so his words made an impression on me. I believed him.
So why am I still so scared right now?
***
I’m lying in a bed draped in pale lavender sheets, and despite the significance of this moment I find myself inanely consumed with how much I’d like to change the colour scheme of the setting. Standing all around me are a representative sample of my loved ones: friends (who will tell the ones abroad that I’ve passed on?), family (has my husband died yet?)–and I see I have lived a good life. The only truth I could come up with was that we should try to love as much as possible, so today I think I’ve succeeded. I have loved–sometimes I have even loved a little too much. The important thing is that I am at peace with things, but I feel the heaviness of it now weighing down on me. It is a tiredness I have never known before, and I know all I have to do is close my eyes and never open them again.
All the stress and weariness will leave me in that one step–but I will lose my friends and my family to a world I will no longer belong to.
It’s all up to me. It’s my choice.
Am I ready?
***
Wait–maybe I’m ill and it would be a relief to shut my eyes forever–a welcome end to the pain. But still, it’s that goodbye that’s so difficult….
***
Am I more reluctant to shut my eyes? I don’t know.
***
Or what if I’m suddenly hit by a car, or shot down? There would be no time to realise what was happening, no time to be scared. Would that be better? Sometimes I think, if I could just get rid of this fear, the rest wouldn’t matter….
***
I’m old, but not ill. It’s simply my time to go. I have outgrown the world. My husband died earlier this year. It is my choice to die now. It’s what I want. I love my children and my grandchildren, but no one will ever replace the one I built my life with, and I don’t understand these new generations. I am happy to go.
I shut my eyes–
and I can feel myself being lifted out of my body! It’s magnificent–it’s like nothing I’ve ever known on Earth–I never could have even dreamt this–it is a feeling of release, no bodily weights dragging on me anymore, all my old ailments removed to make me into a creature I could not have been even in my brightest youth. I’m floating, looking down on my family (don’t cry, I’m still here)–
and it hurts, seeing them but not being able to speak to them.
***
No–I don’t hover, I simply go. There’s a white tunnel, or maybe nothing like that, but I’m going somewhere all the same. Someone is guiding me (an angel?) and I wonder where we’re going.
Hell?
I never believed in it during life, but now I’m scared it will turn out to be real after all.
I think of the life I led: was I a good person? I always thought so, but now I’m not so sure. Everything’s so subjective, who’s to say what’s good or bad? I loved many people, but I’m sure there were times when I hurt those same people (who can avoid that?). Maybe, to a saint, I’ve been an unforgivable sinner, and now I’ll be flung down into the flames, or whatever it is that waits for me–
or maybe there is Heaven and that is where I’m going. But I’m so used to my Earthly life–what will I do in Heaven? Will I see God? Will we all sit with the Creator and worship Him eternally? Because, as good as I have always believed God to be, I can’t imagine spending eternity worshipping anyone. I like to think love is not so one-sided–I want to be part of something, interact.
(Strange how I debate these things, as if I have a choice in the matter, like a pick-n-mix: choose any afterlife you like, all for one fixed price.)
And what about all the people I loved in life? Will I always remember them, or is my memory going to be erased? Was any of it ‘real’? Did it have a point? Because I refuse to accept that I put so much energy into those relationships, and loved so much for what felt like so long, all never to see any of them again.
It may be blasphemy to say so, but I’ve never been good at making new friends; I can’t imagine anyone, even God, comforting me over the loss of those I left behind–and I’m worried Heaven will be boring.
***
The weight is too much for me to handle any longer, and I wearily shut my eyes in relief, never to open them again–and I’m hovering.
‘Come with me,’ a voice whispers from somewhere in the ether, a place I can hardly recognise as having any dimensions at all. ‘It’s time to leave,’ and I realise this will be the last moment I ever have to savour the thought of those I love. Maybe, if I hold onto that thought tightly enough, it will be enough–but how long is enough, in the face of eternity?
And really, what’s the point, when this voice is drawing me through pathway after pathway on the road toward a new life. I will be reincarnated, and forget this life ever existed. I will be a new person, learning everything all over again–and that is terrifying to someone whose greatest fear has been of amnesia.
***
No–it turns out Vedic philosophy is correct after all: we keep our memories as we grow in a new mother’s stomach. I am in this situation, now. Nine months is a long time to sit in such a small space, at the mercy of another, with nothing to do. It’s dark in here. The walls are close against me. Some may find that thought comforting, to be so close to a nurturing mother, to be part of her. But I always had difficulty reaching out physically. I would close in on myself like a tent when I felt emotionally confused. My shoulders would shrink against me, my head would dip, and I felt like a lone creature spinning in a moment of outer space, dreading the moment when someone who seemed so far from me (despite being just a foot away) might hug me before I was ready to ask for it myself (even if secretly I also wished for it). Now I am hugged constantly, and it is too much. I need my distance, my space. I need to have control over this in order to feel safe, and right now I feel invaded and consumed. I can’t move or turn over. I kick and scream, but I am almost ignored.
I have always been claustrophobic, and this is like being buried alive.
I suppose this means that, again according to Vedic philosophy, birth will be so traumatic I’ll forget everything and everyone I once knew. I’m going to start over again. At least I know when it will happen, I guess. I can prepare.
Except, now that I think about it, that’s a lie. It’s worse to expect it, I realise.
At least, when it’s a surprise, you don’t have time to be afraid. Blissful ignorance.
***
Surprise. That’s what it is right now, as it suddenly hits me that I am dead–yet I’m still here.
I am a ghost, I reason.
I can’t let go of the life I’ve known so long, and I think I passed away in my sleep. I was unaware of it happening. It wasn’t peaceful at all, because I woke up believing all was normal, but suddenly I was all alone in a world where no one could hear my voice, and that was always something painful to me in life–that’s why I became a writer; I needed to be heard.
It took me a while just to understand what had happened to me. Just a few moments ago, when it all came to me in a rush, I grew so scared, I still can’t stop shaking. How can things seem so normal, when I’m dead?
And here I am, still wondering what afterlife awaits me–and when it’s going to come.
***
I’m alive–I think.
Every life has a theme. Mine is this: I have never been certain what is real and what is not. Ever since I developed my fear of death, I’ve been even more uncertain. I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. Every undisrupted moment, it returns to me. At night, I shut out the lights and lie in bed, and I think, ‘Could this be the last time I see the world?’–and I find I am terrified to fall asleep.
‘We must go somewhere,’ I tell my husband one night when it gets so bad I have to wake him (as long as I’m not alone, I will not die). ‘Our minds travel while we’re unconscious. That’s what dreams are.’
He nods patiently, like he already knows this logic is not about to end happily.
‘But if that’s what it’s like, I don’t want it,’ I continue, ‘because I’venever had anything but nightmares, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid to go to sleep. I couldn’t bear it if that was where we went.’
(Again, reasoning as though I have a choice in the matter.)
He takes my hand and rubs it with fingers I can’t bear the thought of never seeing again. I stare into the veins and silently pray that just this once the blood in them will never stop running–that we, out of all the universe, will never die (and part of me perhaps even believes this prayer will be answered).
When I awaken the next morning, I am both relieved to find I have awoken at all, and angry with myself for carelessly falling asleep without even realising it –think what could have happened to me.
***
I always dream of death–maybe one day I won’t wake up just before I’m about to be killed….
Even as I write this, I’m sure I’m still thinking of it as a fantasy. I’m not believing any of it might be real. I’m distancing myself from it again. If it’s on paper, I can pretend it will never happen to me.
Maybe when I’m old, it will feel more real to me–more acceptable, welcome even.
For now it’s so hard to carry on and act like everything is normal in this strange world we’ve created, filled with all sorts of things to pass the time, while we wait for the end and struggle to decipher the point to everything.
Maybe there isn’t one.
I once firmly believed there was a purpose behind everything. I always believed things happen for a reason, and for our ultimate good, and therefore there is a loving God out there. I believed it was illogical to suppose something (life, consciousness) could come from nothing (a void). I didn’t believe in the Big Bang. I thought it illogical for the Biblical God to put life on the third object from one sun, and scatter the rest of the stars all to give us light.
But now I ask: why do I take it for granted that there is any logic to anything at all?
***
I’m dying. I can feel it.
I always used to think it was horribly depressing to imagine we simply die–that nothing comes next–we just end. I wanted to believe someone loves me and will be there for me after I leave this world. But maybe that was just placing my human conceptions on a superhuman universe. Maybe there really is nothing at all. And that doesn’t depress me anymore.
Think of it this way: when I was younger, there was a song about death that contained the lyric, ‘No more pain, no fear.’ For some reason, though, I would always accidentally sing, ‘No more hope, no fear.’ I would then laugh at the absurdity–but why is it so absurd? It would be a wonderful thing, in a way, not to have any hope. Without the promise of something inconceivable, we would not hope so much for what actually makes little sense to us–and perhaps we would not think about the matter at all–
and bang! No more fear.
(After all, isn’t that fear the worst part about death?)
If there’s nothing beyond this, I have nothing else to worry about. I will no longer need to think, I will no longer be. I lived long, I have left my mark on the world, and I have loved many people. I have done the best I can. I always worried I would die before I had done all I ever wanted to do–but how can I feel regret if I no longer exist? I think I’d like to know what happens after I die–but none of that would matter if I were well and truly gone. No more thoughts. No more feelings. No more fear.
***
Who knows when it will hit me? It could happen at any moment–but it doesn’t matter. I will never have to think about it again. I will never wake up to feel any passage of time, or remember I even wrote this story.
No more thoughts.
No more feelings.
No
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