Afraid of Dying

by Lloyd B. Abrams

I’m afraid of dying, afraid of death. Afraid to be no more. That everybody else will eventually die is of no comfort. For when all is said and done, I’m here by myself naked, all alone.

There are those times – those states of consciousness know as hypnopompic and hypnagogic – those moments just before waking or just before falling asleep – those vulnerable in-between moments when my defenses have been inactivated or have not yet kicked in – when that overwhelming fear of death comes flooding through. And I feel stricken.

Sometimes I cry out “No No No NO NOOO!” and I sit up in bed and I shudder and see the infinite black nothingness of no longer being. When I’ve been too loud though I’ve tried to keep it down, my wife half-wakes out of slumber and mumbles, “Wha ... what is it?” and I answer, “You know ... the usual” and she says, “Oh that” and she reaches her hand out to me while she slips back to sleep and I lie there panting, my heart pounding. I reach for the earphone, click on my radio, and push a button for a station with voice.

“It’s Robert from the Bronx. You’re on 660 WFAN. What’s on your mind?”

It doesn’t happen often, but it also does happen when I’m awake, and I gather the strength to filter away and attenuate the immutable fact, the absolute truth, that sooner every day, I will cease to be.

That I can write about this should be cathartic. But it’s not. It’s like looking at myself from without.

That I’m not continually paralyzed by my fear of dying is a cause for rejoicing.

– Based on a prompt from the Writer’s Beit Midrash, Skirball Center May 23, 2011

Rev 1 / May 24, 2011

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May 2011…Copyright © 2011, Lloyd B. Abrams