1 August 2022
return
A fear of death was the root cause of my psychological break in 2018. It has taken years of soul-searching, self-exploration, philosophical research, and ultimately worldview-obliteration to come to a place where I am no longer petrified of death (mine, my loved-ones’, friends’, even strangers’).
I know now why it so frightened me. But I will not delve into that here; it’s written in a memoir piece, elsewhere.
What I will share here is that now, I no longer fear death. Rather, I have personified it in my imagination. All my life, I’ve been hounded by this intangible, unquenchable need to be “held” – for someone to “hold space” for me unconditionally. There I no such person in this world, you know. Probably not for any of us. That is not a sad reality; the solution must come from within. We must find a way to hold space for ourselves.
For me, now, I envision death as that person holding space for me. In truth, it’s the universe that does that, but I like to personify death, to calm my own anxieties. Death is the one guarantee we have in this life. It is synonymous with life, and as the culmination of that cycle, it represents the sublime as much as birth. I can rely on nothing except that I will eventually be taken back to the earth, and because I am so much a daughter of soil, that brings me relief, calm, and joy.
So bury me under a great oak tree. That is where I belong. I am going home.