On thanatophobia

There’s one question that follows me around, haunts me like a monster under my bed. It feels wrong to even wonder about it, and every time I do, it leaves me scrambling to find another thought to latch onto instead. To distract myself from the inevitable. But when I am not actively suppressing it, the deafening existential drum in my ears returns.

Who will go first? My mom or I? Will I be left to pick up the pieces of my life after she’s gone, going through the motions of planning a funeral, managing her will? How will I navigate any of that? I feel like I’m still a kid. Or maybe, will she have to bear the unspeakable burden of doing all the aforementioned morbid tasks for me, instead?

Thanatophobia literally means the fear of death in Greek, whether it be in regard to oneself or a loved one. It’s the intense, persistent and even irrational anxiety of all the ways in which it could happen and its aftermath. It can often be a silent, overwhelming dread, as is the case for me. For some people, it’s caused by trauma, near-death experience, past loss of a loved one or terminal illness.

Having a mom that bore me at an older-than-average age has forced me to consider my possible futures while still extremely young. You become self-taught in hyperawareness of your classmates’ parents’ age relative to your own single-parent. You start to ponder who you will have to turn to and how to go on living in an empty house that was once a home in the case of an unexpected passing. Will I be sent off to live with my grandparent? And after she’s gone, too, what would come next?

I have always felt the urge to think much farther down the line than any child ever should. Always worrying that every phone call or conversation will be the last. Always making sure that when my mom’s sleeping, I can hear the steadiness of her breathing or see the rise and fall of her chest — that was my lullaby. It goes without saying that for my worldview to have reached this point, it had to have been shaped by my lived experiences throughout my upbringing, and naturally, thanatophobia can create a sort of codependency between my mother and I. The love I have for her is overflowing and simultaneously draining. It’s boundless, but confines me. Perhaps my biggest fear is actually that the shattered glass of my vacancy would be rendered irreparable in her life.

“A parent should never have to bury their child,” as the saying goes. But over the last two and a half years, I have seen that happen more than I wish I could recall, and I’m sure many reading this would relate. I have had images of death in the most unimaginable ways seared into my memory, making my limbs go weak. What must be a hollow pit in a mother’s heart after that point just deepens and darkens — the stuff of nightmares. It’s a reminder of our own dwindling mortality and the forces that are, to our desperation and powerlessness, out of our control. 

You see it so often; youths gone too soon when they had their whole potential to discover ahead. Wishes from dearest friends, long lost classmates, teachers mourning someone thought by all to light up rooms. They share snapshots of a life of vividness that can never be captured in the mundanity of words. Did they know they would be remembered this way? Or was this retroactive declaration of love never outwardly expressed when it ought to have been? Something like death is simultaneously so sacred, profane, macabre, ambiguous to some, clearly defined to others, and yet whole communities are paradoxically born and built around it. 

For whatever reason, for me, death has always felt imminent. It could be a fantastical superstition, me being paranoid or simply that I’m drawn to existentializing media. I am always looking over my shoulder, always overly-cautious that the moment will come and I will not have had the chance to give loved ones closure or make a dent on this spinning world of ours. To sow seeds in a garden I will never get to gaze upon. To be a dandelion and leave a piece of myself everywhere I’ve been. Even when marveling at the beauty that surrounds us, I can’t help but stop to ask myself when the last time I look up at Orion’s Belt may be, so I look up each time, as if it is the last. 

Part of me wants to write this as if it’s a fail safe. Almost like an “a-ha” moment that feels a bit like cheating death – to express these thoughts in an excessively dramatic, grandiose way “before it’s too late.” That moment may not come soon, and articulating this constant anxiety, which plays like white noise as the backdrop of my day-to-day, feels strange, something that I almost wish I were anonymous writing, or even that I should refrain from entirely. But finding the words can also mean acknowledging, validating, momentarily soothing it.

And so, I implore you, too, to look up at Orion’s Belt each time.

If my thread of life is deemed worthy of early and unexpected snipping by the Fates, at least there will be a record that I had something to say about it.

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