Have you ever experienced the sudden, echoing, yet fleeting feeling of overwhelming fear in your chest? The one where it feels like something wraps its icy hands around your heart, squeezes, and it pulses across your body like frozen lightning. As soon as it appears, it is then gone and you’re left somewhat dazed with the shadowy leftover of sadness, panic, and confusion as to how it happened.
When I was in middle & high school, I used to get this feeling often and without warning. I would be walking home from the bus, sitting in class, or reading a book (entirely unrelated to the mention of death). In middle school, I was the quintessential goth: chain pants, black, shirts with ‘funny’ and sassy sayings on them, and a love for My Chemical Romance and The Used (which I admit, a decade later, I still love those bands–RIP MCR). I was obsessed with the dark and morbid, surrounding myself with all things that screamed death and darkness. Despite all of that, I was terrified of death. It was a five letter word that struck in me a fear of the unknown, of not existing, of drawing a final breath with lungs burning for air. I tried to immerse myself in the idea of it so I could feel more comfortable with it. I wasn’t suicidal, my brain was racing to the end of my timeline–when I was eighty- or ninety-something and on my deathbed. I figured that the last fifteen years of my life have gone in a flash, why not the next seventy? In the moment of that aforementioned fear, it felt like that moment would be tomorrow and it gripped me so tight that it would send me into a panic attack. A few years later I developed depression that was noticeable enough to seek help. I was harming myself to feel pain through numbness, and my inner voice was very mean. The venom in the things I told myself was so intense, especially late at night, that I would make myself cry until I passed out from exhaustion.
My first memorable experience with a close family death was with my maternal grandmother’s passing in 2008. I couldn’t comprehend how someone could exist one moment, and not in the next. I would remember the tears on her face whenever we left her house after a visit (she lived 6 hours away in WV and we could only visit 4-5 times a year).
I wonder if she was thinking that it might be the last time she saw us?
She passed a week before Mother’s Day weekend that year, when we were to go up and visit to celebrate it and my mother’s & my birthday (ours a week apart).
How can someone look so different when their face is still, gravity pulling it down, body so strangely still with no breath to swell the chest?
Other deaths of distant family friends have felt disconnected and unreal, since I didn’t know them directly. Other than family pets, I’ve only yet felt such sadness after the death of my mentor’s mother last fall before Samhain (Halloween). Although I only spent time in her presence two or three times, her passing hit me hard. I knew it was coming–she was sick–yet it still came as a tidal wave of confusion and surreality of not understanding where she had gone.
How is it that I can no longer hug her, talk to her, see her, when I just did that last week?
I’ve been trying to approach a different way of coping with death as a concept. It’s a natural, inevitable part of the life cycle–despite how much we strive to put it off.
No one gets out alive.
When I fully embraced being Wiccan, I was immersed in the understanding that we were once a part of the earth and the force of life that swirls around us. When we have our physical incarnation to carry out a living journey, we must eventually come to terms that someday we will rejoin the life force embodied by the earth. We will merge with it and nourish the next cycle of life that comes after us. We will be come a part of the grass, flowers, and air that lives on after us. Green burial actually highlights this point, that being buried naturally into the earth will aid the process of new life. The embalming fluid, concrete, chemical-treated wood, artificial materials, and ash of cremation is an attempted barrier made by the living to separate themselves from the idea of the withering, rotting corpse that will become of that person in a matter of days and weeks. We try to prolong death even after it has happened.
I collect animal skulls to remind myself of the simplicity of mortality. The fascination of seeing this beautifully macabre thing that was once encased in blood vessels, muscle, skin and fur/hair/feathers is a stark reminder of the almost incomprehensible concept that it once lived as I do now. I keep them (and clean them) to honor their time on this earth. I care for them because that is my way of acknowledging that life force. Someday I hope that there will be one who remembers my life force like that.
So then I ask you to do this for me. Listen to “In a Week” by Hozier. Don’t just listen to the lilting melody, really listen to the lyrics. This song on repeat has instilled a calm in me that I’ve never known. It places beauty of nature next to the sad realness of your death (and that of those you love), and–at least for me–helps me deal with the bigger picture of the world. Though I may be hardly a speck of dust within the blink of human existence on this planet, I will someday contribute to the future of its environmental prosperity.
Ten years later, that cold feeling of fear has become a heavy stone suspended in my ribs. The warm pulse of my heartbeat is much steadier, despite the smoke-like evasion of the fear that once sent me into a spiraling frenzy.
I’d call that progress, wouldn’t you?
Breathe, ground, and repeat. One day at a time.
Finding Stability: Grounding Amidst the Chaos 