Behold a pale horse

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.-- Revelation 6:8.


~*~

I received a Christmas card telling me that another old friend had died. I wanted to write a proper obituary, but I don't know her year of birth. I found myself almost unable to breathe, and instead of writing about her, I wrote about the fear itself.

Sitting down very late, I wrote:



The news that still another old friend has died, causes me to nearly hyperventilate. I had last seen her in 2006 and she looked fine. That was two years ago, but of course, it seems like last week. (The compression of TIME that seemingly occurs with aging is proof enough that Einstein was right...time literally speeds up as you age.)

My fear of death sometimes overtakes me like a whirlwind...all of my talismans and novenas and amulets and incantations and invocations of saints, the existential wall of safety that I have constructed, turns to mesh, to porous cheesecloth. My fortress wasn't IN PLACE, shields DOWN; my saints have all gone to lunch, I have misplaced my amulets. I am confused and tired, I am not thinking clearly. And I hear of the death of one who is especially strong in my memory, a vivid soul that danced in front of me, made a deep impression. No, not her. She had more energy, more life than all of us.

It's like I left the back door unlocked. FEAR rushes in like some viper, like the Devil himself, whom I suspect he is. He slithers in while my reinforcements are down, gone, misplaced, asleep at the wheel.

It leaves me breathless and dazed, this kind of fear. It sweeps through me like the presence of sudden summer thunder. It's painful, it sears. You can wait, wait, wait for it to subside, but it doesn't, because then it is fully commingled with your grief.

Yes, says the fear, you will die, too.

~*~

Although I devoutly believe in souls, spirits, etc., earthly death, the death of the body, the mortal self, is often very frightening and final to me. I do not know what comes after. As in the movie Jacob's Ladder, I think the crossing over could well be terrifying, as we cling to our human consciousness, as we endure what the Church has called purgatory, what Eastern faiths have named Samsara. Maybe we won't be ready, and we will have to do it all over again. (Perhaps the sharp fear, a Buddhist friend once told me, is due to the fact that we HAVE died before?)

~*~

Do any of you ever experience that kind of fear or sharp (pleasant? unpleasant?) awareness of your own mortality?

I will write more about my friend, but I did not want to infuse her obituary with my fear, and conflate the two here, as I have in my own head. She deserves her own obit, and I will write one. But not quite ready yet.

Comments most especially sought. Thanks everyone.