Fear, and Leaping Anyway

First published on Facebook, September 4.2021
***

My calendar for the next month has filled up quickly. Nearly every day is already spoken for with friends visiting, zoom chats with family, nurse appointments, hair washes from my CNA, massages with the hospice volunteer, or the occasional days I’ve blocked out for John alone. And then I scroll down to October 3rd, and suddenly there’s a bunch of white space. No wonder i have that anxious, excitable feeling like I’ve been strapped into a rollercoaster and it’s starting to click up the tracks. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been engaging in a power trip with the customer service reps who should be helping honor my warranty for a broken patio umbrella. Before any of you kindly suggest that I should no longer have to deal with such mundane crap, please know 1) you’re likely right, and 2) I’m still not ready to fully surrender this hokey pokey between Earth and spirit. The human experience these days is filled with bureaucratic annoyance and I only have about 29 days or so left to enjoy it. There’s only so much relaxing and love-and-joy accepting I can metabolize each day, and getting a wee salty with email reps seems to be a fine way to use up nervous energy. 

In other news, a friend wrote last week to say what struck her about my October plan is that it sounds like I have no fear of death. Since then I’ve wondered if this is true,. It feels true, but I also know the forces of repression, bypassing, and dissociation are strong and sneaky, and I’m just as susceptible as any other Jane.. Might my cranky exchange with the umbrella warranty people be a sideways expression of terror? Or maybe it’s grief talking? Or would all reasonable people get upset when corresponding with an insurance provider who appears incapable of opening an attachment!? 

I think it’s understandable to be afraid of death, and skeptical of those who say they aren’t. Fear of death is normal. Who wouldn’t be afraid of leaving the light of the known world for the great dark mystery? On this side of the veil all we “see” of death while still living---if we physically see it at all in this death-hushed culture---is a dead body. There’s no animating force left. Someone is there, and then they’re not.  You used to have conversations, and now you can’t.. And if you try to keep having conversations with the deceased, and feel you actually are getting answers, you best be careful who you confess it to; there’s still judgment aplenty out there for cross-corporeal communication. 

In any case I’ve noticed most people who claim they don’t fear death are still very much alive. You Scorpios out there---I see you---are known for waxing romantic about the beauty of death, but I’ve noticed few have jumped on my suggestions to honor that attraction by volunteering for hospice. Why is that? I’m not here to start astro-rivalries though, many, many people speak with bravado about death while still holding her at a safe distance. 

Yet there's a subset of people who genuinely have little fear of the transition---and indeed, call it a transition instead of merely an ending--- because they’ve had an exhilarating near-death experience or they’ve had undeniable contact with those who’ve passed. In the majority of cases these experiences simply can’t be written off as wishful thinking---they are often life changing.  And those of us who prefer the easier, softer way,  may have ingested enough entheogens (or other psychedelics) to claim embodied knowledge that consciousness itself cannot be destroyed. (My current best understanding is that the aperture surrounding it simply changes based on conditions of “light.”) If you try to argue with those of us who’ve witnessed as much, you won’t get far. It’s like we’ve had our own religious conversion, and materialist logic is a flimsy adversary to what we know in our bones. 

But here’s the thing. Despite my trust that consciousness will survive the death of my body, it’s not as if I know where I’m going in the white space of my calendar. There’s no Fodor’s Travel Guide to the other side, and the glut of pastel-covered books in the spirituality/metaphysics sections, while sometimes compelling, are heavy in anecdote by necessity and often conflict wildly in message. Perhaps the other side of the veil is meant to be a mystery, it’s part of the design. If we could define and measure everything about Source /God/dess/HP/The Universe, I’m thinking it wouldn’t actually be very divine. 

So I want permission to fear death. I want permission to feel everything and anything at the end of my life, without trying to hold myself to inhuman expectations. Grief, joy, heartbreak, tenderness, rage, lust, loneliness, despair, confusion, contentment.. The whole human shebang. Artists want access to the full color palette to express the nuance of their visions. Shouldn’t the dying/living be given the same freedom and dignity in their emotional lives? God save me from having to be “positive” all the time, because doing so only expresses terror and contempt for “negativity.” And it’s hard to be around someone unfailingly chipper. Like those who claim they never get annoyed with customer service reps. It’s suspicious. 

Even if I know the roller coaster is safe, my stomach is still gonna drop during the fall. My loved ones can walk me straight to the edge of my calendar, and even if I trust there’s loved ones waiting on the other side of the blank space to catch me, i need to be willing to leap from one grasp to another. There’ll be a moment suspended in air, right? How could there not be? Sarah, my beloved nurse friend who’s coming to stay with us in October, tells me she’s never once seen a hospice patient dying who didn’t have a smile on their face or a profound air of peace surrounding them. Maybe it’s even easier than I think. 

In either case, I’m sure the next few weeks will uncover much more. I’m trying to remember Ii have permission to feel everything. Everything! Until I’m no longer in human form, I want to welcome the full human experience, as messy as it can be, sans judgment. Annoyance at Allstate included. Nervous excitement included. Big love, big tears, and hopefully big laughter every day. Thanks so much friends for coming alongside for the ride---you all have really been showing up, and I’m so grateful for the good company. 

​
Photo of woman leaping by Sammie Chaffin via Unsplash

​