Fear Itself

I know that I'm starting this early morning rumination with no sense of its destination.  I'm going to use this post to try to discover something. Check it again tomorrow; if it's still here, it likely will have changed. And feel free to suggest how that might look.

A friend of mine has a sister who is dying of cancer. The dying woman is the mother of two children - one seven, the other eleven.  A week ago yesterday, at the consent of her husband and family, she was removed from life support. Food and liquids were withheld. Doctors predicted she would die within hours - two days at the most.

As of yesterday she was still alive. Her eyes were still responsive. Several of the doctors - including friends of hers, as she too was a doctor at this hospital - have observed that such tenacity is sometimes seen in mothers of young children. Yesterday as my friend and I speculated on this, I asked when the last time her sister had seen her children. My friend explained that the youngest had not wanted to go to the hospital, so she hadn't seen him since being transferred there.

Might it be that this woman has been holding on to life past all reasonable expectation because she desires to see her small child before she dies?  She cannot say, and we cannot tell.  But I'm sure most parents who love their children would hold the same answer in their hearts, and would know this answer as an article of faith.

I had another conversation this week, this one with a different friend. We talked about her son, now 14, and my daughter, 11, and their similar dispositions toward school. Soon we were doing what parents inevitably do, shaking our heads at the relentless passage of time and voicing concerns - nay, legitimate fears - about the years immediately ahead and what we knew they would almost certainly contain. Sex. Drugs. Alcohol. Cars. Abusive relationships. In short, all the risks our own lives have presented us.

How, we wondered, does one do this - this letting go? Sure, we really live under an illusion of control over our kid's lives and security even now, but how do we ever bring ourselves to set them out in a world which we know through our own experiences involves pain, abuse, sorrow, and dances with death? How do we let go this part of ourselves, let it out into the world we know is as laden with risk as it is reward?

We talked about the way we deal with the small things.  Like many of us, I fight with my daughter. On the surface, the fights are over petty things.  She fights back like a lawyer. She changing, engaging more complex strategies still uses violence and tantrums and whining and other tools of the immature, but now she also blends in reasoned argument and assertion of rights. The other day, when caught using an unacceptably vulgar term to describe a fellow discussant in a chat room she explained, "Daddy, I'm getting to an age now where kids begin to experiment with language like that."

Sure, she'd stolen the line from me; I had suggested the very same thing to her several weeks before when asking her if she or her friends ever swore (of course, she told me no). But to hear her snap of the explanation so quickly and capably made me take a step back. She's changed. 

And I know that while the fights are over small things - bedtime, too many snacks, wearing or not wearing a coat to school -- there is a larger subtext motivating me. My daughter is entering puberty. Soon the arguments will be over curfew, car rides, boyfriends. The temptation will be to smell her breath when she gets home, to search her room, to question whether or no the band she's listening to is reflective of her state of psychological well being.  And it won't be because of concern over what I might find. It will be because of larger, less accessible fear.

Fear of letting go. Fear of pain, and suffering. And death.

This fear iosn't limited to my daughter, either. My father had a near heart attack. He's already had a tumor taken from his lung. My mother has emphysema. My wife's father has had a stroke and an arrythma.  Both her parents have.  One friend's mom has cancer.  Another's dad just died of it.  I've entered into that stage in life when I am now concerned for the health and well being of growing children and declining elders.All this fear, this fear of loss, of separation.

How do we let go that which we cherish most?  My friend's sister is teaching me the simplest truth - we don't. It's not going to happen. And if it's not going to happen, if letting go easily is not part of the program, then I must learn to live in accordance with Franklin Roosevelt's great statement, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The undoing does not come by death or destruction. The undoing comes from within our own minds and hearts, when we chose to seek a way out from the nature of experience.  We learn to live with the fear. We do what we can, we do the best we can, and we accept the inevitability of fear, the inevitability of suffering, and the inevitability of loss.  And we work to nurture and express our love, and - like my friend's sister - we hold on to it. becuase it is what are are, it is what we do.  It's not a battle against anything.  We care because we are here;  our loving energy is binding.  So is our pain. They arise together, from the same source. Our sorrow and our suffering come when we fail to attend to these simpler principles of experience and existence.