What Scares You Most
My mother is buried among sage brush, on the edge of a desert plot of land that also holds a handful of dead ancestors, including two pairs of twins who, due to nineteen-century disease, never made it to adulthood.
My family is lucky enough to own our own graveyard. There's something very special about possessing the land that your bloodline is buried in. When my mother died and was buried, my father and brothers lowered her casket with ropes in the grave they dug themselves. My sister and I laid the first shovel of dirt on top her casket, which sound I can still hear and makes me nauseous to this day. We will all return to the earth; it's comforting to know I'll be returning to the same spot of earth as my family.
While weeping intermittently as we paid our last respects in the cool October dusk I couldn't help thinking how much my mom would have enjoyed her burial. Not that she would particularly enjoy being dead or that all her loved ones were wrecked with grief but because we were in a graveyard on Halloween night. "This is spooky!" I could almost hear her squeal. "Let's tell ghost stories." This thought of her lifted my heart, allowing oxygen to finally course through my grief-clenched body.
Strangely, that was the first time that week that I remember laughing-as she was lowered in the ground. Imagining my mom's delight that she was buried among the dead on Halloween night actually made her burial more tolerable. I even hate to admit it, but it actually made the night enjoyable, if for a brief moment.
In a very literal sense, I was celebrating Halloween that night. Hundreds of years ago, the holiday was a way to remember the dead, but in more recent years, Halloween has taken a strange turn. While I'm happy there is a socially acceptable way to ask for candy from neighbors and I have no qualms about costumes or pumpkin carving, I'm not sure how I feel about Halloween replacing what was once a holiday to honor our dead. Death isn't part of the holiday anymore-fear is.
I don't know how important it is to embrace our fears, as some experts claim. I may be biased though because I'm a bit of a chicken. Fears do have their purpose. Our brains are wired to flee or fight; our fears keep us alive but that has me thinking: do I really want to be kept alive by my fears?
The scariest thing to happen to me had nothing to do with goblins or witches or men with chainsaws. It was when my infant daughter was misdiagnosed. The doctors eventually corrected their error but still didn't know what was causing her seizures. Clearly something was wrong with her brain but what? For a month I was left to run through the worst case scenarios in my mind. Fear had a major impact on my physical health. It was hard to walk, to carry myself. I felt like my legs were made of lead. I couldn't focus. The fear was nearly paralyzing me.
I hated when people told me not to worry, yet what did worrying do for me? Nothing constructive. Eventually everything was made right with my daughter but not without its lasting effect on my psyche. I wish I had learned sooner faith is an excellent antidote to fear.
I think fear is a distraction, an illusion. Fear disappears when we do not feed it. Life and death are real- fear exists only as long as we keep it. The monsters under our bed have vanished long ago. We know better. Fear is nothing more than the unknown.
When we focus on the unknown, we are distracted from the things we do know. We know we live and we know we die. Death is not something I'm morbidly anticipating but accepting it's place now, I feel, will save me from regret later on. When we know what's coming we can prepare for it. If we aren't remembering our dead, our own death seems far away. When we aren't living a life worth living, how are we honoring our dead?
I think that's what the dead are most afraid of.