Thanatophobia is the fear of losing someone you love. For some people, this fear does not evolve simply from the idea of death, but arises from the experience of someone very important to you dying.
For me, this fear began my senior year in high school, when one of my close childhood friends dropped dead from an aneurysm, and soon after, my grandfather, whom I adored, lost his fight with Alzheimer’s disease. Originally, I understood I would have to cope with the emptiness and inability to ever communicate or simply look into these individuals’ eyes again.
However, it grew bigger than that.
Learning to cope with the death of a loved one comes with time, but there comes a time where you have to address the fear that swells in you when you receive a phone call. Or the slight panic attack you have every time your parents don’t answer their phone. Or the distress you feel every time your little brother gets on an airplane, or your older brother drives back to college.
You would think that at some point in time you would accept the fact that people die. Yet, the fear does not leave.
Many people have preached if you “truly trust God” then there should be no fear of death. This idea makes no sense to me. Because someone trusts in God, do they lose the humanity that enables them to love and to be hurt?
Many times, I have wondered how individuals find solace in hearing the “He’s in a better place now” speech. As a human, I am selfish, so in my head I respond, “To be perfectly honest, there is no better place than with me.”
Today, I get on a plane to California with the purpose of laying my godfather to rest. As I prepare for this, I’ve had an epiphany, which is slightly morbid, so bear with me.
This idea is that we are made to love.
There’s an emptiness in us that we fill with the love of the people around us. Over our lifetime, we grow incredibly close to people, and our lives literally revolve around the existence of these individuals. Then comes the day where these people are taken from us (or us from them), and everyone has to continue living their day-to-day life as if a key cornerstone has not just been removed.
Yes, we still have their memory, but their presence and the habits we have formed with/around them have been completely disassembled. So, it seems we are made to love people and to have the people we love ripped away from us by death.
So how do we deal with our fear of death?
We recognize that people will die, but we interact and live in such a way where their memory, although it will never make up for the actual person, will still give us a sense of comfort.
Not in the comfort that “they are in a better place” or “God has something better planned for them,” but the comfort in knowing every opportunity you had was spent expressing your love and appreciation for the individuals around you.
Rachel Granger is a junior international studies major from Pearl.
