Chapter 21: The Fear of Death or the Death of Fear?

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

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Chapter 21: The Fear of Death or the Death of Fear?

Another February day peeked through the bedroom curtains, awakening Elizabeth slowly from a dream reverie. Once fully awake, she got up immediately, no thinking, and went to the kitchen to prepare her breakfast. As she busied herself with making her oatmeal, she noticed again that she hadn't heard her next door neighbor closing her cabinet doors for several weeks. Elizabeth remembered that just few days ago, she had also seen a moving truck removing items from an apartment on the ground floor. Elizabeth wondered if it could be from her neighbor's apartment. Later that same evening, she had mentioned her observations to Vincent, wondering if perhaps the woman had died. Vincent had replied that perhaps the woman had needed to move into a retirement or rest home. He recalled that he had once seen the older woman on the back stairs, moving extremely slowly and breathing very hard, rasping with each breath. Elizabeth had only had brief glimpses of the woman, maybe once or twice, and never outside of the apartment building. Elizabeth had also noticed that the local pharmacy made regular deliveries to the woman's apartment. 

Elizabeth's thoughts returned to her breakfast. She decided she would venture outside immediately after she finished her breakfast, not stopping to read email, make a mandala, or write her morning pages. She felt the urge to be outside and was already longing for the warmth and regeneration of spring, even though vernal equinox was more than a month away. 

Just after exiting the building, Elizabeth noticed that the concierge of the apartment building was doing his daily snow shoveling and general clean up. She stopped to talk with Gilles and mentioned her concern about the neighbor. Gilles told her that the woman had died a few weeks before. She had fallen in the bathroom, broken her hip, and had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. She had died in the hospital and her family eventually came to pack up her personal effects and move them out of the apartment. He mentioned that the woman had lived in the apartment building for perhaps forty years, living first with her husband and then continuing her sojourn when her husband had died. Elizabeth was amazed. The woman and her husband must have moved in shortly after the apartments were built. Elizabeth thanked Gilles for the information and wished him a good day—“Bonne journée!” 

As she began her walk, Elizabeth's thoughts focused on the woman and her death. She felt sad that a life so close in proximity to where she was had left the world and that she had never really known the woman, other than by the sound of kitchen cupboards closing. She thought of the solitariness of the woman, how Gilles had said her family didn't visit and that the woman didn't really want anyone coming into her apartment. Elizabeth sighed, thinking of the loneliness and invisibility the woman perhaps had experienced. “Who had acknowledged her existence?” Elizabeth wondered. Elizabeth sighed and noticed another feeling welling up inside of her: fear.

Elizabeth took a deep breath and continued walking. The fear thoughts started crashing through her mind, creating scenarios about sickness and death: 

--“What would happen if I had a heart attack right now? I could die right here where no one knows me and where no one can help me. Remember Maurice, Vincent's uncle? He dropped dead while mowing the lawn, and he was only eight years older than I am.”

--“I could die at any moment. Both of my parents died young—52 and 66. Maybe it's in my genes.”

--“Could that pain in my hip be cancer? What if it is? I could be facing immense suffering ending in a painful death!”

--“What about that spot I noticed on my skin? Could that be skin cancer? Remember that neighbor's friend who found a small spot that disappeared and the man died a year or so later at the age of forty-five! The same thing could happen to me! I could be ill right now and not know it!”

The thoughts kept coming, one after the other; the stories became more and more dramatic; but each had a common theme—the fear of death and dying.

Elizabeth became aware of her racing heart and shallow breathing as her body responded to the onslaught of fearful thoughts over which she seemed to have no control. She tried to calm herself down by countering with rational thoughts like:

--“Everyone is dying every day. If I believe that all time is happening at the same time, then I have already experienced death.”

--“My parents may have died at younger ages, but two of my grandparents lived into their eighties and Nonna lived to be over ninety.”

--“There are strong painkillers doctors use when people are dying so they don't experience so much pain.”

--“I ride my bicycle a lot and walk almost daily and I eat pretty healthily most of the time.” 

But as quickly as Elizabeth could create a thought that counteracted one fearful story, another thought would emerge to counteract hers. She was fighting a war in her mind, and somehow the fearful thoughts always seemed to be stronger than her rational thoughts.

Elizabeth felt her mind spiraling out of control. She took a deep breath and attempted to put all of her attention on walking, knowing that focusing on exercise would sometimes alleviate the stress of the fearful thinking. She wondered why she still had these fears about death. She thought she had dealt with the fear of death and dying over the past few years—each time a family member or friend had died. For some reason, though, the neighbor's death had brought it back to the forefront of her thoughts. What could she do to eliminate this fear once and for all? Was that even possible?

Elizabeth recalled a quotation by Guy Finley she had read in her email the day before: “The mind, emptied of its attachments, fears nothing...while the mind full of itself spends its time fearfully watching over everything.” When Elizabeth read the quote, she felt that she finally had an answer to why she thought she had to guard against every possibility in her life. Her mind was “full of itself.” At first, she saw the phrase as signifying that her mind was literally filled and overflowing with thoughts. But she also knew that the expression described the condition of the ego mind that believed its thoughts were superior to and more valuable than anyone else's thoughts, including those of the Higher Self, whose thoughts, Elizabeth believed, flowed directly from the Mind of God/Source/the Universe. 

Despite her attention being focused on the quotation, Elizabeth could still feel the fear inside. She considered the first part of the quotation. She understood that her mind needed to be emptied not of thoughts it seemed but of its attachments to those thoughts. Elizabeth wondered if that meant it wasn't the thoughts themselves but her attachment to them that created the problem. “Why would I be so attached to those types of thoughts? Of what value are they?” Elizabeth asked herself.

Considering these questions, she turned toward her apartment. Sometimes she thought feeling the fear that resulted from her scary thoughts actually made some part of her feel more alive. That part wanted her to imagine and become attached to dramatic future outcomes rather than being present to life as it unfolded. That part, also known as ego, used the uncontrolled fearful thoughts Elizabeth allowed and the resulting emotions and physical reactions she experienced to give itself a life. Those ego thoughts covered over and, at times, blotted out any other thoughts, much like a painted background would cover the pure canvas of her All That Is analogy.

“How can I let go of these attachments?” she wondered. Elizabeth thought of a video she had seen recently. The woman who taught meditation was talking about sadness and how meditation didn't try to alleviate sadness but gave one a space to sit with it, to let sadness exist without resisting it or the feelings that came as a result of it. Elizabeth wondered if the death of fear could result from practicing the same process, not necessarily by using meditation, but when the fear thoughts came, Elizabeth could stop trying to fight them or attempting to reason with them. 

The idea of sitting with fear created fearful thoughts. Elizabeth actually smiled at the irony. How could not doing anything but letting the thoughts come unrestricted bring any kind of peace? She already knew that her fearful thoughts could run through her mind at breakneck speed, so how could allowing them to do what they did best possibly slow them down or stop them? Perhaps the answer to that question was found in whether she attached herself to the thoughts by attributing truth to them or by seeing them as a present moment reality. 

Though she doubted that sitting with her thoughts would help, Elizabeth was willing to try anything if it would stop her spiraling into the fearful abyss from which it took days and even weeks, at times, to emerge. She certainly knew the much-used adage, “What you resist, persists.” Could letting go be as easy as not resisting her thoughts but just allowing them to sit with her, to allow them to express themselves but not to assist them in creating stories about her future? Elizabeth didn't know. She supposed she would have to try the next time she felt fear's grasp on her heart and mind.

As she arrived back at the apartment building, Elizabeth definitely felt more peace than she had at the beginning of her walk. She was thankful that the fear thoughts were somewhat under control. “I wonder if fear hampers my ability to embrace life and see its magic,” she wondered. The thought floated quickly through her mind as she again thought of her neighbor who had died. Elizabeth sent up a quick prayer to the Universe, asking that the woman's final journey would be one of peace bringing her soul into the Heart of God.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.

Chapter 11: Symptom Chasing

This manuscript is both a memoir of sorts and a work of fiction.  The stories and events included are based on my life experiences and memories but I have changed names, details, event sequences, and outcomes throughout the work.

Read Chapter 1       Previous Chapter       Next Chapter

Chapter 11: Symptom Chasing

A few days before Christmas, Elizabeth awoke with a start. She felt a shooting pain in her left hip. "Now what?" she thought. She lay still for a few moments, trying to remember what she had done the day before. Had she bumped her leg? Did she do some kind of different exercise? Had she carried something heavy? She remembered she had gone the market and brought home two good-sized bags of groceries. She thought she had made sure that the weight in the bags was evenly balanced but perhaps she hadn't been careful enough. She checked in with her body again. Yes, the pain was still there, although it felt a bit less intense. What could it be?

Elizabeth's thoughts continued to churn, trying to figure out what the problem could be. She could feel her worry thoughts feeding the fear growing inside of her, which was rapidly becoming a terrifying monster that would soon control her. Elizabeth tried her worry technique, but it wasn't working. This worry was increasing in each moment, threatening to explode the top of the Worry-o-meter scale. So Elizabeth decided to take control of the situation by heading to her computer and starting what she liked to call symptom-chasing. (Vincent would always warn her against succumbing to this temptation because it rarely ended in what Elizabeth desired—peace of mind.) 

She sat in front of her laptop, hands poised over the keyboard, ready to type her search terms into Google. Her fingers struck the keys as she typed “hip pain” and “arthritis.” That would be a good place to start. The search results page was displayed and she perused the list. She chose one of the items and began reading about arthritis and hip pain. She checked the symptoms—Yes, she had that one, no not that one, no not that one, no not that one. She decided that her hip pain didn't match the criteria for arthritis. So she began again, this time typing “hip pain” and “menopause” (after all, these days menopause seemed to be the blame for so many ailments). Once again, she got her results, chose one, and began the hunt for the symptoms she had. Elizabeth continued this process again and again, using other search terms, eventually ending with her ultimate worry and fear—cancer.

By the time she had finished searching and researching her symptoms, Elizabeth was drained. She noticed that her hip was hurting even more. She now had a whole host of diseases and their symptoms buzzing like angry hornets in her brain, injecting venom in each thought that surfaced. At this point, she knew two things for sure: she felt dis-eased and she had absolutely no peace of mind!

Elizabeth pushed her chair away from the computer. She decided to go sit in the living room and try to relax by quieting her thoughts and eliminating the stories that were playing out in her mind's eye, each one with more pain, debilitation, suffering, and agony than the one before. She positioned herself on the couch and took a deep breath. She could not believe how fast her heart was beating, and as if to keep the thoughts going, there was another twinge from her hip! The drama of the moment overwhelmed Elizabeth. She believed she could only see the fear and feel the pain and experience the suffering. She believed she was hopeless to stop these racing thoughts. 

Elizabeth closed her eyes and took another breath. As she did, she thought back to the beginning of the year and all the different symptoms she had chased. She considered the long list of diseases that she could name along with their symptoms because of her need for discovering and controlling any type of illness or discomfort that would come her way. (Vincent was always astonished that she knew the names of so many different diseases, syndromes, and conditions. Why shouldn't she with all the “research” she had done!) She realized that not one of the diseases of which she was afraid had manifested. After thinking that thought, she noticed that the projections had finally slowed down from the quantum speed at which they originally were racing through her brain. She sighed. How could she have allowed the spiral of fear and worry to overtake her yet again? What benefit did this cycle of pain, symptom-chasing, fear, and exhaustion give her? What did she hope to accomplish by submitting herself to this time-consuming and useless process? These questions were ones that she never seemed to be able to answer satisfactorily. 

The challenge for Elizabeth was the knowledge that fear always lurked just beneath the surface of her consciousness, even on the days that she felt a relative peace with her life. All that was necessary to unleash the fear in varying degrees of fury was some perceived change of the status quo, or what Elizabeth believed was the status quo. Elizabeth wanted to learn how to control the fear without having to experience the downward spiral into its clutches. She knew that at least part of the answer rested with her ability to control her own thoughts. Certainly, she didn't have to choose to be a symptom-chaser to discover what her symptoms meant (if, indeed, they meant anything at all, an idea which Elizabeth often failed to consider). Chasing symptoms just added to her fear and worry. 

She was reminded of a conversation she had had with Stacy, her astrologer friend, earlier in the month. Elizabeth and Stacy had been talking about the topic of pain in the body. Stacy has said that pain in the body meant that the body was screaming, trying to communicate something that the person had ignored or missed in the spiritual body, emotional body, or mental body. Elizabeth understood the concept because many times when she had a pain she would check the list of symptoms in Louise Hay's book You Can Heal Your Life. She would often be amazed at the correlation between her pain symptom, the body part, and what was going on in her life or how she was feeling. Sometimes she would even do the affirmation that Louise provided for a particular symptom or ailment.

Stacy went on to say that focusing on pain only brought you more pain. That didn't mean that you pretended that the pain wasn't there or didn't exist. (Stacy was also not advocating that a person should never go to the doctor.) She said that we need to acknowledge our pain, look for the message that the pain is communicating, act on that message, and then remove our focus from the pain. Elizabeth was still confused about the difference between acknowledging and focusing. She would have to consider Stacy's idea and see if she could come up with a plan to implement it the next time she was experiencing a pain she didn't understand.

Elizabeth had been a symptom-chaser for quite a while. A few years before, she had broken her ankle and was confined to the apartment for close to two months. During that time, Vincent had to go away for training courses, leaving Elizabeth at home alone with their cat Felicity, her broken ankle, and her fearful thoughts. At that time, Elizabeth had come face to face with her fear of death. Over the next few years, though, she discovered that more than death, she was scared of pain and suffering, of being dependent on others for help, of being debilitated, of going to the doctor and being told there was something wrong with her, and of the opinions of others if she didn't go to the doctor and died because of her own foolishness. (Elizabeth just shook her head at that last thought. Her concerns about what people thought extended into the future, even beyond her death! What kind of mixed-up thinking was that?)

Elizabeth had noticed that she constantly thought there was something wrong with her. At times she thought her body was just mirroring what she believed about herself at some subconscious or unconscious level. Vincent agreed with her. He had talked with her repeatedly about her own destructive perceptions about herself. Some of those talks had illuminated her comprehension, but the diminishing of herself seemed like the only way for her to be accepted, liked, and even loved by others. Elizabeth's opinions of herself fluctuated between two extremes—either feeling like she had to diminish herself because she was too much, too powerful, too overwhelming for people or she was lacking in so many areas, that she was always less than others. Of course, there was also the other strategy Elizabeth used—judging herself before others could. She could remember many times when she told Vincent during heated discussions where she felt that he was judging her, "You don't have to tell me I am flawed; I am well aware of that fact, and I could give you a list of all of them."

What Elizabeth wanted was some way to see herself as she really was. She was tired of seesawing between less than and too much. She was weary of fearing others and their thoughts about her. She desired to cease her endless struggle with fears and worries. She longed to feel accepted fully within herself and to be happy with who she was, exactly as she was. 

Elizabeth took a deep breath, grateful that the fear was being held at bay, finally. As she arose, her hip complained. She could feel the worry trying to entangle her thoughts again. She began to feel the fear quaking her heart. She sighed and thought, "I can't go through this again today." She decided to go outside and take a walk, even though the sun had decided not to peek through the clouds today, the temperature was bone-chilling cold, and the snow had not been cleared from the sidewalks yet. But Elizabeth hoped that a change of scenery might just bring a change in her thinking. And who knows, maybe there might be a piece of magic waiting for her just outside her door.

Copyright © 2011-2012 by Vicky Lynn Macchione.
All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction of this text is allowed without the written permission of the author.