I Fear Everything: death

What comes next?

To put across a sense of emo teenage angst that will more than likely continue throughout this blog post, I’m going to begin by quoting a Brand New lyric: “Jesus Christ, I'm not scared to die but I'm a little bit scared of what comes after”. To put it simply, I don’t particularly fear dying, I fear death.

I fear the absence of life.

I remember fearing death from an early age. My first memory of the mention of someone dying is my parents expressing relief that someone had ‘died peacefully in their sleep’. This was portrayed as a positive thing, but in my head it seemed awful. How dare death sneak up on someone as they innocently slept? At least wait until they are fully awake and functioning to spring death upon them. Due to my skewed childhood logic, I began to think that death was a possible consequence of sleep. Before I slept every night, I worried that I might just fail to wake up in the morning. Such a view was entrenched when I was thirteen and my grandfather passed away in his sleep. Unsurprisingly, my teenage years included many visits to doctors who would often tell me I had chronic insomnia. On the other hand my parents just told me I was a fussy sleeper. Different names for the same thing, I guess.

Even now, I struggle to sleep. I spend so long dwelling on what slipping into sleep will feel like that I never actually manage to slip into sleep. I start thinking about how one moment I’ll be idly thinking about what socks to wear the next day or something equally benign and then the next thing I know it’ll be eight hours later. However, due to thinking about thinking of something benign and then waking up eight hours later, I never get around to thinking of something benign. I just get more and more frustrated as hours of potential sleep inevitably become hours I spent trying to sleep. As the hours creep by, I just lie wondering which one of my body parts is going to kill me first. Despite strong competition from other body parts, I have an inkling my appendix will burst and win the self-destructive race.

I’m jealous of those people who transform their fear of death into a more exciting approach to life. The sort of people who say “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and use that as justification to do exciting things without a second thought. I do have slight moments of courage when I remember that one day I will die and so should probably spend less time watching a plethora of US sitcoms and more time climbing mountains, bear baiting and running around forests; however, such moments of clarity are usually induced by fits of anxiety at 2am and so nothing productive becomes of them. Instead, I just return to my dull life until the next time I’m reminded of my mortality.

It’s a vicious circle based upon my fear of death.

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