Death doesn’t take a holiday

Just when I thought I was out….anxiety pulled me back in.

It’s been over a year since my last post here. I had exited therapy some time ago and was making decent progress in dealing with panic and irrational fear. Highly functioning for the first time in years, things were looking up.

In therapy, my doctor had worked extensively to drive home two main points. First, rather than trying to anticipate and control every possible scenario in a futile attempt to impose safety, my energy should be better spent developing tools to deal with events when they occurred. Second, understand that even though I had a rocky history involving trauma and loss, the worst doesn’t always happen, so don’t anticipate that it will.

Skeptical? You better believe it. But her advice was sound, and it made a real difference for a long time.

August 2010, on our second day of vacation in North Carolina, my wife drowned in the ocean. It was starting to get dark so we prepared to leave, and she said that she was going to catch one more wave. Two minutes became five, then ten. Frantic searching was unsuccessful. 911 was called and rescue teams screamed to the beach, already notified of an apparent cardiac arrest.

Two people, a father and son, had been walking far down the beach and had found my wife floating, lifeless. Paramedics told me she was already cold by the time they got to her. They were very sorry for my loss.

My oldest son was with me, but my daughter had taken my ten year old son back to the beach house when things got frantic. I stumbled back to the rental property and told them Lisa was gone.

It was agonizing. I couldn’t sleep or eat. I had to wait for her body to be released by the medical examiner, then travel to a local funeral home to arrange for the return of her body. I had to make many phone calls to friends and family, including Lisa’s parents.

The worst doesn’t always happen. For me, that’s not true, as has been proven countless times.

The last ten months have been spent holding the family together, and administering my wife’s estate. It’s excruciating. After years of being told that it’s not my responsibility to always look after others, I’m right back in the role I despise.

My young son struggles, as we all do, but he’s already challenged with moderate-to-severe ADHD, and this provides additional burden for him. He’s demonstrating significant anxiety responses of his own, and we’re both seeing the same psychiatrist. She’s been great. But another generation of my family has suffered great trauma. I had hoped the chain would break with me.

Lisa wasn’t there for the first day of school, or Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. We did the best that we could, but it was miserable. January would have been our 13th wedding anniversary, April her 46th birthday. Mother’s Day was difficult, teary, and hollow.

We’re coming up on the 1st anniversary of her death, and I’m not sure what that will be like. Sad and lonely certainly. But what else?

We were going to grow old together, be wonderful grandparents, travel to new places, make a difference in areas we cared about. And now she’s gone and that won’t happen. What do I do with that?

I feel like a psychological Sisyphus, rolling an anxiety bolder up the hill, sweating and grunting, doing the hard work to take me to the pinnacle, only to have the stone return to the bottom yet again. And now my young son has a boulder of his own.

So I’m back. I’d like to say it’s good to see you all again, but that’s not true.

Damn it all the hell.

Death Anxiety

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, writer Dan Gottlieb’s column tackles a question from a reader regarding death anxiety. Whoa – heavy topic that we all try to avoid.

The reader, Ken, has been experiencing health (and death) anxiety since having a serious medical issue awhile back, and wonders what is driving his anxiety, and what he can do about it.

Gottlieb responds with a detailed look at existential anxiety – how humans find it intolerable to think about no longer existing. So we go about creating this huge identity for ourselves as a way to “leave a mark” on the world. The problem with that is that our ego doesn’t want to let that go, even though ceasing to exist is in the cards for all of us.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of being so worried and fearful of death that we fritter away the act of living, and unless you’re a believer in reincarnation, this is the only shot we have.

Gottlieb’s advice?

So between now and then, your job is to live your life as fully as possible, mourn what you have lost, and love what you have.

Then teach your progeny what you’ve learned in life and how you’ve learned it. That could be your way of saying thanks for this wonderful journey. Remember, you fear death because your life is precious to you, but when your mind races to the future, you miss out on your life.

Ask Dan: How to live with anxiety over death

Pig Flu: The Odds Are With You

As the media continue to flog the pig flu story for all it’s worth, and I watch scores of people walking around wearing powder-blue surgical masks – you know, the kind with holes large enough for most bacteria to get through, including H1N1 influenza – it reminded me of how easily we’re moved into fear and panic mode by the remote possibility that something could kill us dead.

We’re all going to die of something, and none of us gets to choose the manner or location of our demise, unless we happen to take matters into our own hands. In the absence of having any real influence over the beginning of our end, one would think that we would concentrate on the next best thing – run the numbers and then attempt to learn from them in order to do as much as possible to live as long as we can.

If you take the actuarial route, you’d find that you’ll most likely die of heart disease – a one in five chance. I don’t see anyone wearing masks that keep cheeseburgers and fries from making their way into the body, or a warning system that sounds if the cold radiating from ice cream is detected close to your lips.

The odds are roughly 1 – 300,000 that we’ll perish in an asteroid strike. Where is the call to spin up a real-life team of crackpots to destroy renegade celestial bodies like that portrayed in Armageddon?

Based on the latest available information, the odds of contracting swine flu are 1 in 29,000, and the chance you’ll die from it are 1 in 736,000. You are eighty times more likely to get hit by a drunk driver right now than you are to get pig flu.

It almost seems that it’s the control, or lack of it, that’s feeding people’s fears. If we only knew what to do, what precautions to take, then we could take them. Even if they were probably ineffective (remember duct tape to keep our anthrax and biological agents?), there’s something empowering about staying out of airplances, washing your hands like Adrian Monk, and trotting around wearing a little gauze mask like Dr. Zorro.

Once again, the best advice appears to be similar to what mothers have been telling us for years – cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands, and stay home to rest if you don’t feel well. The Pork Council would also like to know if it would be too much trouble for you to eat something, after they’ve worked so hard to raise those piggies. Would it kill you to have some carnitas or a ham & swiss?