On Moving through Fear, Releasing the Suffering

My mother was terrified of living, despite the fact that she was terribly good at it.

Every day, she was plagued—with itches, stinging sensations, fits of numbness and with worries, infinite worries about her imminent end of days.

Doctors could find nothing wrong with her in the barrage of tests she demanded. This was her hobby: Googling medical conditions and knocking on doors until she found someone willing, usually under coercion, to admit “yes yes, she just might have” some disease of which there was no proof.[1]

The subliminal messaging to me, her only child, was that to live is to constantly be under threat of dying, to constantly be assailed. While we know this is inherently true--that we will all meet our maker--the suspension of disbelief, the need to live bravely and mostly unfettered by this thought, is critical to our happiness and peace in daily life. The other subliminal message I inherited was that I couldn’t trust my body—that inside, there were constant battles of good and evil going on, that evil was likely winning, and that even if I felt well, I was probably doomed to die on Tuesday.

This fear seemed to grow legs, scuttling into all the corners of my life--from my immediate fear to the point of hysteria upon finding any questionable bump or knob in my body, to the paralysis I feel even now with any writing project and its key milestones—finishing it, letting it fly free, the thoughts of anyone who might read it. Fear, horned sneering fear, is a deep deep current in the well.

Before my mother ended her life, as I listened to her worry aloud, “I’m dying” “I’m sick” “My MS this, my MS that, my lyme disease this and that” I finally started shouting “Great! You’re dying! But you’re also living too! Focus on that for the love of God!” Writer Elizabeth Gilbert discussed this eloquently in her beautiful ode to Rayya Elias, her beloved whom she watched die of a terminal illness:

Somebody once told me and I wish to God I had it sooner: There is no such thing as a dying person. There are living people and there are dead people. And as long as somebody is alive, as long as they have any sentience or sense about them, you have to expect and allow them to be who they have always been.

This is what I wanted for Mum—for her to stand up and get over it already, for her to gather her hem and remember what a wild, belligerent, fabulous creature she was. For her to pat the head of all her demons and say “yes, yes, ok, sure sure, but let’s have fun while we’re at it.” It was a tall ask to make of her, and an ask I found difficult to heed myself. Mum had made life seem simply like a scary waiting room before you die.

In my book I’ve been working on (a tribute to my mother which I’m planning to release late this fall or early winter) as well as within my previous long form blog series on my mother, I discuss a teaching from Zen master Thich Nhat Han that allowed me to move on from the stall of despair I was in after my mother died. At that time, the teaching was useful in casting off grief. It’s been useful still in casting off this inheritance of fear and sorrow, this burdensome way of living life in fear. And that is the notion that we have the power to release the suffering of our ancestors, further, that we can stop the inheritance of their suffering by releasing our own selves from it.

Sometimes it feels easier to do something for others than for yourself. It’s why all the mums and dads on The Voice are “doing it for their children.” When you feel you can give a gift to another you love through some great act, suddenly chasing your dream, relieving yourself of sorrow, Doing The Big Thing, is imperative, it carries greater weight, there is no more avoiding. When it was just little ole you, it felt less necessary, felt like more of a “Tomorrow, tomorrow!” type of thing.

But when I feel the weight of my ancestors, my mother with her heavy sorrow, and all those who came before who passed down their gushing river of tears and fears and ire, I feel the cycle has to be undone.

The notion that I could break that chain, that I could unravel those helixes, that I could reach into the bones and mushy pulp of our blood and set us all free by simply choosing to live—well, simply put, it feels like the task I was assigned, and over the past few years, I have slowly been accepting it.

It feels very good.

My mother was so terribly good at living, when she wasn’t fixated on dying. She laughed so violently she was usually bent over crossing her legs not to pee, she played pranks, often, and cackled at the victims’ angsts and groans, she held babies and smelled their baby hair deeply, arrived with presents, minded the children, danced awfully at weddings, squabbled about local politics, flipped Massholes the bird on I-95. The truth is, how to live was before me all along in her wild spirit, it was just a matter of what to focus on.

[1] In my earlier years, I distilled all this down to “Mum is just straight up crazy, she’s not sick!” I think it was more complex than that—I think it was both, that she was fighting mental demons and that quite possibly she was sick. After seeing friends and loved ones present to doctors without any ultimate indication or evidence that they are sick, without any roadmaps or conclusions to wellness, I can finally make space for the fact that it’s possible Mum was sick, but that tests and doctors were limited with what they could find..