This might be a weird fear of mine. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s weird or not. Perhaps you are all out there fearing this as well. Or perhaps you aren’t.
But as of late, I have become absolutely terrified of dying. But not because of myself. I’m not scared of missing out on life or of pain or of any of the other factors people usually fear when they fear death. I’m afraid of death because of my girls. I am absolutely terrified that they are going to have to face life without me.
The stereotype of the young teen or young twenty something is that they believe they are invincible. They don’t fear death because they don’t believe it could happen to them. And the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor. But I don’t think I ever went through that psychological stage. I’m too much of a worrier. I was always worried I was getting some strange disease or that I was going to be caught up in some horrible crime spree.
Then though my fear was more vague, and it was all about me. What was going to happen to me. How I was going to cope if I got terminally ill. And how I believed it would have all been my own fault.
Within the past week, I have stopped giving Magoo naps. She turns six next week, so she’s definitely old enough, and I have realized that over the past couple of weeks, she was napping less and less and was spending most of her time reading. She’s going to be in school for the full day next year, so she needs to get used to not napping anyway.
I’ve noticed a change in her since we’ve stopped doing naps. Where a few months ago, a day without a nap would end up in crabbiness and crankiness, now she shines. She thrives with personal one on one time, and she has gotten hours of that lately while her two little sisters sleep. We spend the time reading and knitting. She learned to do needlepoint this week, and she has been working a lot on that. She likes our time. She calls it Mommy and Magoo time.
These are some of the absolute most precious moments of my days, and they are part of what terrify me.
I think before we become parents many of us underestimate our own worth. We believe the world would go on just fine without us. We might like being here, but we don’t perhaps feel absolutely indispensable.
Then we have children and we realize that we do more than fill a role. We accomplish more than tasks. We learn that separate from everything we do and everything we do for others, our very selves are indispensable to the well being of others. Yes, if something ever happened to me, my girls would have plenty of people around them to love them and care for them. These other people could do just as well if not better than I do of taking care of them. But they can’t be me. They can’t be the person who nurtured them from the inside. They can’t be the person who birthed them into this world. They can’t be the person who lives and breathes through them. They can’t be the person who represents home and safety and security and acceptance, the person who would die for them and the person who is utterly terrified of dying because of them.
Motherhood has taught me so much about myself and others and the world and life. But perhaps one of the biggest things it has taught me is that we are needed because of who we are.
It’s an amazing lesson, that realization of your own worth as a human being separate and disconnected from everything that you can do and accomplish. But it’s also terrifying because it means we are irreplaceable. And when we live for others, when we put the well being of others before our own, irreplaceable doesn’t leave us with a whole lot of security.
I have no nice and neat way to end this post because it’s not a nice and neat idea. There’s no promise that an asteroid isn’t going to fall out of the sky right on my head before I even finish typing this sentence. We have no guarantees.
So I guess perhaps the only thing we can do is to live the moments we have with gusto. To fill up the love tanks of those we most love as full as we possibly can. To create memories. To create moments. To create legacies that will last into eternity should our journey end too soon.
Still, there are no guarantees. No promises. And that really scares me.