Grappling with Mortality: Part 2

After about five minutes, I was able to calm down enough to where I could go back out to the living room and finish watching whatever it was that was on the TV at the time. I don't remember specifically tying that first panic attack to death or dying, I just remember wondering whether I was sick with some kind of flu or stomach bug. Since I felt okay a few minutes later, I just sort of shrugged it off and didn't think about it again.

I don't think it was that same night, but shortly thereafter I had the first attack that I could directly tie to some kind of trigger thought. I remember getting into bed, and my wife was already asleep ahead of me. My head hit the pillow and suddenly a thought came that seemed to start strangely in my feet and then move itself slowly over my body and then into my brain. I closed my eyes tightly, recognizing the physical symptoms from the previous night.

"One day you will die and leave everyone you love behind. You will never, ever see them again. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is nothing after this life. One day you will die and leave everyone you love behind. You will never, ever see them again. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is nothing after this life."

I remember somehow thinking "What is this all about?" Sure, I'd thought about these things before, but the thoughts had never been so clear, so confrontational and so discouraging.

"One day you will die and leave everyone you love behind. You will never, ever see them again. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is nothing after this life. One day you will die and leave everyone you love behind. You will never, ever see them again. There is no God. There is no Heaven. There is nothing after this life."

My son David was probably two years old at the time. I couldn't imagine a time where I'd never get to talk to him. Maybe the worst feeling was not knowing when I'd die. What if I was hit by a car the next day? My son would grow up without a father. What if I died when in my fifties? I'd likely never see my son get married, or see what he did with his life.

When I died, I'd leave my wife behind. She'd be without her partner, her spousal support. I'd never share another amazing meal with her. I'd never again fall asleep with her next to me, the comfort of her mere prescence putting all the worries of the world to rest. Of course, even with her sleeping next to me now, the worries simply would not go away.

I thought to myself, "You don't know for certain there's no after-life. Maybe you'll get to watch from afar or something." Yes, this was true. After all, no one had ever come back from the dead to say it wasn't possible, right? I tried so hard to cling to this agnostic idea that since I didn't know for sure, anything was possible.

"Don't be stupid. You're thinking that ghost stories are real? You really believe that?"

Again the chills and nausea swept over me. He was right. Of course that doesn't make sense. In the thousands of years of human history on this planet, were it Ghosts and Spirits a reality, somebody, somewhere would have found some kind of scientific evidence of them. "Well, maybe Heaven does exist though. Maybe it's not the Christian thing, or the Islam thing, but it's just heaven. We all end up on a different spiritual dimension or something?"

"So every human being from the earliest homo-sapien to those who pass away now will somehow inhabit some new space? What language do you speak in Heaven? Do celebrities get special treatment up there, too? How does any of that make any sense at all?"

Damn. He got me again. This internal conversation went on for about thirty minutes. I kept imagining the point of my own departure, and trying to reconcile the sudden nothingness with my life as I was living it. The more I thought about the cessation of all existence, the darker the room felt, and the more restricted my breathing felt. At one point I wanted to roll over and wake my wife up so I could tell her what I was feeling...but for whatever reason, I didn't.

In fact, four or five times a week for the next year and a half I had these attacks. I never told my wife about them; not once. Part of me thinks she knew about them on some level because from time to time she'd ask me if everything was okay, and I'd tell her that yes, everything was fine. In fact, outside of these panic attacks, everything truly was just fine. Going a step further, when I wasn't in the middle of one of these episodes, I was exteremely happy and content.

Each night I'd go to bed, knowing that just as my mind drifted to silence in anticipation of sleep, a dagger would be thrust into it, piercing deeply into my consciousness. As I obsessed on this subject, I actually decided to start praying again. I decided that at worst it would just be me talking to myself, and at best I'd actually be talking long-distance to President and CEO of Life on Earth As We Know It, Inc.

My conversations with God were all basically begging for a sign of God's very existence. Thinking about it, that's a pretty silly idea; talking to someone asking for proof of their existence. Like asking someone for ID while you're chatting them up at the supermarket or something. I felt I had to do it though. I'd talk to God and say things like "Okay, so if you're out there, I'm sure you're well aware of what's going on in my head right now, so I'd like some kind of proof, anything that will show me there's something else that happens when we die."

Night after night I'd get into bed and the cycle would begin. I'd feel sick, then I'd panic, then I'd try to soothe myself by conversing with a deity, begging for peace of mind. I truly felt that if I could just get some kind of evidence, one way or another, on the existence of Life After Death, I'd be able to make peace with whatever that truth was, and then I could live my life free of these panic attacks.

I began praying, an act that some would argue was me practicing some kind of religious-based tradition. I hid it from my wife as well. I hid it from everyone. I didn't want anyone to know about my panic attacks, much less that I was feeling compelled to start talking to the People in Charge. I would evade any questioning on my state of mental health. The less news I gave out, the fewer questions I'd have to field.

For about eighteen months my nightly routine was the panic-attack-int0-pray thing. Silently I slogged on through my journey towards spiritual enlightenment. But nothing was getting any better...in fact it was getting worse. It wasn't until we took a trip to visit my Dad up in San Luis Obispo that a series of events broke not only silence, but started me towards acceptance of, if not a cure for my obsession with death and its crippling panic attacks.