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hilarious conversation with my mum over Christmas, while out walking. she was asking me how I was etc and I said oh god you know ok, terrified of dying from time to time, especially when I consider dad died at me +12 years and we're v much the same genetically and in patterns of behaviour etc and I said what about you? are you scared of dying? and she sad 'god no, I'm scared of living too long. I don't want to live as long as my mother (93 and still going, though the short-term memory's fucked). I'm just frightened I'm going to outlive my sons.' (she has reason, which I won't go into here, but which doesn't involve me, other than in my fears). Anyway, we agreed to split the difference, which should work out well for both of us.
In fact although I'm periodically paralysed by fear of death, I mean literally paralysed in the form of a panic attack, there are other times that it seems ok, nbd, and it's only really pain that I fear. I try not to think about it.
There were two other things that brought this conversation to mind recently - one was Ernest Shackleton's letter to Winston Churchill, who he was trying to convince to back his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, where he says 'Death is really a very little thing and Knowledge very great' and I thought when I read that that if he had not been a person for whom death was a very little thing, he would not have been able to survive with his team stranded two years in Antarctica or travel 750 miles in a five man boat to get rescue. They returned to a world where death was not at all a very little thing and was in fact in the process of slaughtering an entire generation.
the other was the review by Adam Mars-Jones in the LRB of Grief is a Many Feathered Thing by Max Porter (might be paywalled, sorry), which quote this journal entry by Emerson after the death of his five-year-old son Waldo:
What he looked upon is better; what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday, I woke at three o’clock, and every cock in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonoured by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the hen-house, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn. – For everything he had his own name and way of thinking, his own pronunciation and manner. And every word came mended from that tongue …
It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another … He named the parts of the toy house he was always building by fancy names which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’
If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook.
So when I've stopped fearing death out of fear of pain and annihilation, I then go on to fearing it because of the absence of people I love, which isn't intended to be too pompous, but also include getting pissed down the pub with friends, laughing, going to sporting events, holding someone I love very close etc etc.
trying to pretend it doesn't exist doesn't seem to work either.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 31 January 2016 17:56 (eight years ago) link
i'm not sure that anything really works - there are people who have the terror you're describing and i'm far too familiar with, and people who just don't really have that same fear. or at least i believe them when they tell me that.
so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out. the subtle gradations and variations and transferences of the fear have been...interesting...to observe as i've got older i guess.
but short of some magic White Noise pill i don't really know how to make it stop either, and i wonder how much it's messed with my general demeanour over the course of near-40 years
so i dunno about you Fizzles, but i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear
yep this. want to stress I'm not paralysed by fear regularly, just every now and then, and it's more a point of curiosity or interest than anything else. I'm not a particularly morbid person - it's more a larkinesque domestic version of the void that hapoens at night, or something akin to vertigo. but obv not enormously pleasant while it's happening.
― Fizzles, Sunday, 31 January 2016 22:54 (eight years ago) link
amateurist wrote upthread:
so how does consciousness deal with the timelessness of death? does it create an artificial sensation on a sort of "loop," that is experienced as if eternal? does the last moment of experience resonate eternally?
^^this is my biggest fear re: death, i suppose.
i'm not a very ambitious fellow, i don't experience #FOMO. but i'm worried that at some point a switch will flip and i'll be like "OH SHIT WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS AND THIS AND THIS WHILE I WAS YOUNG, I COULD HAVE GONE SO MUCH FURTHER"
man alive's last post has been haunting me, lol.
― lute bro (brimstead), Sunday, 7 February 2016 22:25 (eight years ago) link
three years pass...
i get by thru a little avoidance, a little forgetting, and a little getting better at recognizing the moods and moments that will trigger the big waves of fear that (used to) swallow me so fast and whole that i wanted to jump out of bed and run round the house and into the street and keep running until i passed out.
^^^ thanks to NV for writing this, especially the bit about 'moods and moments'. I really only get fear of death when I'm tired and/or stressed out over something that I can't do anything about. All the thousands of ways I can't do what I want - that are nebulous and myriad and impossible to consciously keep track of much less do anything about - get solidified into a fear of death, which is at least something concrete and can be reacted to (even if the reaction is fear).
― just another country (snoball), Saturday, 30 November 2019 22:08 (four years ago) link