Fear of Fear
by the Editor
Something nagged at the back of my mind when I read each one of this month’s EAP contributions, and I couldn’t quite place what it was. It’s always deeply interesting to me to see what people want to add to the general EAP dinner conversation, and what was interesting this month was that there was a kind of holding back, a kind of skittishness…I wouldn’t want to call it a lack of clarity (though sometimes there was that, too), more a feeling of getting-led-up-to-the-water-and-refusing-to-drink.
Then it gradually dawned on me. Almost everyone who wrote about fear this month wanted to, or maybe needed to, end their thoughts with the fear in some way beaten back. Conquered. Transcended. Of course, I loved that: being an obstinately optimistic American, one of my many annoying qualities is my own Pollyannaish way of insisting everything is for the best – it’s my (and my culture’s) default setting. But still, it did strike me. In the end, it struck me as a fear of fear itself. As the one thing that can’t be bested.
You know what I mean. It’s terrifically hard, maybe impossible, to accept that we’re going to die, as Harvey Lillywhite points out so poignantly in his essay this month. None of us can do it. I remember sitting with a dying friend, while he sat naked on a couch watching daytime television (“well, for sure it’s something I’m not going to be able to do when I’m dead”), and he said something that never left me: that what was most important to him in the Bible was that Christ, on the cross, at the last minute couldn’t bear that he was going to die – even he asked why God had forsaken him. My friend said it meant a lot to him that the story was when God became Man, he was just as afraid and at war with his own body as my friend, now dying of AIDS, was with his.
And I remember my own feelings when another young friend of mine died, too far out of sequence for it to make any sense to the rest of us, and how I felt such terror at the idea that I was trapped in this body that was going to die that I had to go to bed for three days. The feeling was like being in a burning house and knowing there was no exit. “Let me out!” my spirit screamed. But of course there was no way out. And the conflict between my spirit and my body paralyzed me for a time.
I don’t think we can hold that feeling for more than a little while, probably for just that reason – it paralyzes us in the middle of life. And what struck me about a lot of this month’s discussion was that it held off from that feeling as being the last one, the unconquerable one, the one that can’t be dealt with…well, just because of that. Because it can’t be dealt with. It can only be endured, and, sometimes, it can be forced to give up a secret you may or may not have wanted to know. Which, come to think of it, may be a reason to wrestle with it, just for the hell of it, just to try and snatch some meaning, after all.
But there you go. There’s my default setting showing again, insisting even death has to have some meaning, add to some advance. So. I think instead I’ll have another read of David Budbill’s poem, Early June , and have another walk outside in the spring weather. You can’t have too many of those, I find.
Welcome back.