Dear Diary: Ten People, One Fear

Dear Diary,
I’m scared of dying.

It’s so much more than that, though. I’m petrified of it. I think I’ll kill myself worrying about how I’m going to die, and what’s going to happen afterwards. I think the uncertainty is what worries me the most. I don’t know if heaven exists. If it does, is it certain I will go there? I spend too many nights worrying about all of this.

I can recall the first funeral I went to. It was my great grandma’s. I was three years old…I got my ears pierced that day. I’m from a Jewish family, so the funeral was a big deal, and I remember seeing the coffin my grandmother laid in being sealed in a mausoleum type structure. I just remember the heart wrenching pain I felt when I watched them caulk the stone onto the front of the chamber and seal her body away forever.

Now, my grandmother and I were never close. I think the only time I told her I loved her was the last time I saw her before she died…I think the thing that hurt the most was knowing she was human, and she was gone. Even at three…I can remember thinking that I was human…and that was going to happen to me one day, too.

I remember the first time I really thought of death. I was eight years old and peacefully lying in bed, half asleep, then it hit me... I was going to die one day. At eight, my mother didn’t know what to do with me when I sat straight up in bed, screaming for her. I cried for three hours, begging her to not let me die; at that time, I didn’t realize it was out of her control. At eight years old, I know that I thought my mother had all the answers, and she’d never let the big bad Grim Reaper get me.
After that night, it felt like weeks before I slept again, the thought constantly breathing down my neck.

I was about twelve when I came to the conclusion that my simple fear of death was so much more than that. It was a phobia. A phobia is defined as a mental disorder that involves the experience of a persistent fear that is excessive and unreasonable.
Looking back, I realize that throughout my life, I’ve always been weary of the topic of death. I had recurring dreams of my father dying in a shooting, and me being there to help plan his funeral, staring straight into caskets. Countless nights I dreamt of my mother dying of some unknown disease. I believe I saw ghosts. They were horrible ghouls staring me down. Now, I’m not scared of ghosts, I’m just terrified of how they became nothing more than neither-here-nor-there anomalies that go bump in the night.
I never really had to deal with death, not until I was about thirteen. My mom and I moved to a small town in Florida, living in a house with her girlfriend and her best friend. His name was Terry, and he had liver cancer. I grew very close to him over the year I was living with him. He was my Uncle, though not biological, he still meant more to me than anything. He was family.

I watched him die. The drugs slowly withered him to pieces, the tumor in his liver engorging his side. I remember taking him to the nursing home because we just couldn’t give him what he needed…and I was going crazy watching him die. Still, I gathered my senses and every day I went to visit him. I saw him less than twenty four hours after he passed away… It was nearly 11:30 in the morning, and while I stood near his bed, he stared at me with these empty eyes…he didn’t know who I was anymore. I feel like that hurt more than saying a choked out ‘Goodbye, Uncle Terry…I love you’. I rushed out as soon as the heavy words hit the cool air inside his room. I didn’t turn back. I knew if I did, I’d have driven myself crazy.
He was pronounced dead at 2:00 am the next day. I can’t tell you how I cried. It took a while for it to set in. Around nine that night, I just fell to my knees and sobbed. We didn’t have enough money to bury him, or cremate him. All the employees at the funeral home could talk about was money! It was the cruelest, most insensitive experience I’ve ever suffered through.

I dreamed of death…seeing the sunken face every night for a while. I still do.
My necrophobia has put me in a terrible place. I jump at every sound, and I rarely go out after nightfall, in a group or not. I won’t go on any rides at the fair that aren’t sealed, and if they go up in the air, forget it. I ran out of a family friend’s funeral screaming and crying because the man in the open casket seemed to be staring at m from beneath his eyelids, and then I wandered around the graveyard with a chill through my body, jumping and flinching and feeling as though someone was watching me and breathing down my neck.
Therapy hasn’t helped me. I went for months and nothing has changed. I shake and cry when I think of death and dying. I’m terrified to go to bed at night, because I don’t know if I will wake up. Meeting new people is scary for me; What if they try to kill me?
I’ve become irrational and illogical. I don’t know how to feel. I find myself trying to live life to the fullest, but I can’t because I’m scared that everything I do that means I’m taking the slightest risk scares me.

I hope that one day I laugh about all this, that this fear just disappears and I’ll be fine and live a normal life.

Until then, I guess I’ll just keep worrying.
Love,
Nikki