C.S #1

Living With The Fear Of Death.

Twelve thousand five hundred kilometers… approximately. That’s how far away I am from home. And while it was the best thing I could have done — putting an ocean between myself and my traumas — seven years later, I am only now appreciating how brave I was.

Yes, I cried when I said my farewells at the airport and boarded that plane alone. And yes, I have cried many times since — from loneliness, sadness, sickness, and depression over the years. But recently, I came face-to-face with my mortality in a way I never had before. And when I tell you what my ailment was, please refrain from calling me a drama queen (I’m a Virgo that went to film school; all I know is spectacle.)

Yes, I had a stomach flu or bug, or whatever promax virus my students had remixed and passed on through a careless cough. The symptoms on the first day were so violent that my body felt like it was trying to evacuate itself. I shook. I shivered. I had never been sick like that, and I’m not known for a high pain tolerance, but recovering from cosmetic surgery was gentler than this. That day, I had an event to attend in Seoul — an hour from Suwon — and to get there, I threw up three times on the walk to the bus stop before sitting through the ride, pale and hollowed out; too afraid to take a sip of water in case my body retaliated. I still made it through the event and even had the liver to go out for drinks with a friend that night, because I didn’t want to flake at the last minute. The all-day sleep I sank into the next day felt like my body plugging itself back into a charger.

Then on Sunday afternoon, I sat at my kitchen table with dry toast and a cup of Five Roses, steam curling up like a quiet offering. The tears slipped out. Not because I was five teabags away from the box being empty, or because I was unwell and alone, but because the night before, as sick as I was, I had tidied my apartment. I had folded the blankets, cleared the counters, lined things up neatly — just in case I didn’t get up the next morning, and someone had to come find me. I didn’t want to be discovered like an unfinished thought. I didn’t want them to find me in chaos.

It’s not that I don’t think about death while being so far away from home; I’ve often thought about writing a will, about putting my affairs in order like files in a cabinet, labeled and ready for hands that wouldn’t know where to begin. But I never ever got to it, it always seemed a bit too adult, too soon (in an inviting the idea to tea kind of way), and too damn morbid!

It took me a full week to recover from whatever had taken hold of me, and at the end of it, I realized I’ve been living with a different illness this whole time: I’ve been living with the fear of dying.

The fact that South Korea is not my home, that these are not my people, and that I don’t have a will or haven’t told my family what I want done when that day comes sits in me like background static, a quiet signal my body never quite tunes out.
So on the days my load is heavy, I feel it in my chest, like carrying a suitcase I never get to set down; packed with things unnamed, unresolved, and always asking to be held.

And I’ve come to wonder, how have I managed this whole time?
Because this isn’t new. Death has always been a fear of mine. When I was younger, it was something I used to survive.
  “You’re not dead, so you’re okay.”
  As I got older, it became, “But did you die though?”

I’ve shed childhood fears. I’ve healed many of those early traumas. But this one stayed, like a smoke alarm that never stops being sensitive. I don’t want it to cripple me anymore, because fear does that; emotionally, spiritually, mentally. Fear will hold you hostage without ever naming its price. And yet, somehow, it isn’t the enemy.

Fear has kept many people alive. When the alleyway is too dark, and the air feels wrong, fear is what makes you choose the brighter street. When something in the bushes moves, and you can’t name it, fear is what makes your feet move before your mind catches up. Fear isn’t the worst thing in the world. It shapes choices that sometimes save your life.

My fear, however, may never leave me. I don’t think it’s built that way. It’s stitched into me, sewn in early, the way some lessons don’t come from words but from moments that split your life into before and after. My grandmother didn’t mean to pass this fear to me, but loss has a way of becoming inheritance. Her absence taught me, too young, that people can simply… stop being here. And once you know that, you can’t unknow it.

So maybe the point was never to outrun the fear. Maybe it’s time to decide what I do with it.

If death is always somewhere in the room, then so is life, breathing in the same air. If I am this aware of the possibility of leaving, then I have to be just as intentional about being here. About loving loudly. About going to the event even after throwing up at the bus stop. About building a life twelve thousand five hundred kilometers away from where I started. About making memories dense and solid enough to outweigh the shadow trailing behind them.

Fear told me to survive.
  Now I want it to remind me to live.

Not carefully. Not timidly. But fully, in a way that would make the woman whose death first scared me proud, that I stayed anyway. That I kept going. That I didn’t let the knowledge of endings stop me from beginning things. That even though it's heavy, I live with the fear of death, and I still thrive.

- Kareemah Maphasa Straker