Conquering Fear of Death

A friend of mine explained to me once how they’d lost their fear of flying. “I just stopped caring if I died,” they said.

This is what happened to me when my daughter Mercy died. I had been told all my life about how great my religion was, because it promised that the righteous would be reunited with dead family members. In particular, it promised mothers that in heaven, they would be able to raise children lost to death in this life. The problem was that I wanted that so much, I spent much of the time directly after church meetings on Sunday fantasizing about ways to make that reuniting become a reality.

Even now, when people (religious or not) insist that my daughter is waiting for me—if only I could believe, I have to explain to them very sternly that they are not telling me what they think they are telling me. To me, they are tempting me once more to choose death over life, because when you make death sound so good that people aren’t afraid of it anymore, then, well, people aren’t afraid of death anymore. And that is actually not necessarily a good thing.

I’m not afraid of me dying anymore. I’m afraid of one of (or all of) my other five children dying and me having to somehow figure out a way to survive the very worst again. I’m afraid of making mistakes that make them hate me. I’m afraid of wishing I had died with Mercy for the rest of my life. I’m afraid of an even worse disintegration of my family than has already happened. I’m afraid of every part of life—except for death.

Sometimes, well-meaning religious folks will tell me that “Oh, no, if you kill yourself, then you won’t be able to see your daughter again. That would be a sin and you have to be worthy to be with her again.” And that makes things even worse because as that idea has sunk in, it has made it impossible for me to want to believe in (or worship) a God who would make such a rule. It is a horrible catch-22 for a mother to be told on the one hand that her only purpose in life is to protect and raise her children and then on the other hand to be told that her child was taken away by God and that she will never see that child again unless she is “good enough” while she is suffering the torments of being alive.

This led to a number of months of me being tormented with a future in which my daughter watched me from heaven, judging me for every action I took, whether or not it was “good enough” to get to see her again. Later, I began to feel that the whole idea of her remaining an infant so I could raise her was also torturous. What mother would want to make her child unable to grow and progress? That seemed cruel and selfish.

It was easier to start to accept that Mercy was dead and gone, that I might have caused her to die or might not, and that it was over now. There was nothing left to be done for her. I was alive, whether I wanted to be or not, and that is the way life is sometimes. It is given to those who don’t deserve it. Taken from those who do. It is not a gift, but a burden. But it is what it is. Mercy does not have it. I do. God did not choose to take her from me and she is not waiting for me. These are the only things that keep me still living. Anything else, and I have no reason to remain here with you.

August is always a difficult month for me. Mercy was born in August. She also died in August. I can never know if I could have saved her, if I had gone to the hospital on Saturday, or on Sunday, as I had felt driven to. I will never know if I’m the reason she’s dead or if I was useless as a mother from the beginning. Not knowing is sometimes better than knowing for sure. But my dying isn’t something I fear anymore. I sometimes wish for it.

The cancer scare I had earlier this year seemed like a blessing in disguise. If I could die without killing myself, that would be the perfect ending. No one could be mad at me. God couldn’t punish me.