Content warning: mentions of alcoholism, depression and suicide.
If a death happens in Illinois but no one in Colorado heard it did it really even happen?
Wolfie and me a few months after his dad’s death. (Grace Moore/Radio 1190)
By Grace Moore
My queasiness has been the bane of my existence. I’ve walked out of movies many times. I’m a 21 year old woman that cries getting flu shots and I was the only person in my freshman year biology class that had to exit the room during the pig dissection. It has eventually come up in every relationship in my life.
“I’ve come across queasy people, but you are just unreal,” is something I’ve heard all my life.
Everyone seems to have some level of queasiness in small, random ways, but I really have a problem. I get asked all the time why I’m so queasy and for a long time I didn’t know. It was just the way I was. Now, I think it has a lot to do with my fear of death. The functions that your body does are very intricate and fragile. If one small thing goes awry, death could immediately be at your doorstep. That is not something that is ok with me. Your blood is supposed to be in your body keeping you alive and so are all your organs so that your body can keep functioning. I don’t think anyone should be ok with risking that in any way and I think everyone should be just as queasy as I am. That is of course not how it works at all.
I don’t know if my queasiness makes me more or less scared of death than other people, but I’m leaning towards the former. I know a lot of people talk about their fear of death, but to me it’s paralyzing.
Recently, my boyfriend’s dad committed suicide. It was a complete shock to me because I live in Colorado and my boyfriend, Wolfie, lives in Illinois along with his family. I know that the act of committing suicide is a choice, but when it happened it didn’t really feel that way. His dad, Mr. Burtner, didn’t choose the genetic predisposition to alcoholism and depression that was just thrust upon him from birth. It didn’t really matter afterwards if it was a choice or not because the grief wasn’t a choice.
My fear of death was exacerbated by about one million percent. I feared for my life when I crossed the street, when I got in someone’s car and when I went to bed. Each day I felt like I was pulling myself around to do my daily responsibilities while dealing with this grief and immense fear at the same time.
These feelings were completely internal. Since Wolfie and I are long distance, the people in my life hardly knew about Wolfie, let alone his dad. Then, when I talked to Wolfie I couldn’t tell him how I was feeling because what was happening was absolutely not about me. The people in my life might’ve been at least a good listening ear. However, I felt like if I talked about my grief and fear that it would, by some unknown power above, curse me.
All of these internalized emotions quickly lead to nightmares. Each night when I went to bed I suffered another nightmare in which I was chased to my death. I dealt with these dreams on and off for a few weeks. My real life and inner life felt completely different. My life didn’t stop in any way. I still had to go to my Radio 1190 team meetings, do my homework and go to work.
Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more and I called my mom to tell her what was happening. She said that I could go to therapy on her insurance and I told her that one more and I would. After talking to my mom about the nightmares, they abruptly stopped.
I felt even crazier. It was as if I was lying. The nightmares stopped and eased my mind about death back to a normal amount. It felt like the past few weeks of my body feeling like a thousand pounds was completely made up.
These emotions feel so distant now even though it was only a few months ago and watching the people around me not have any hindrance in their life is starting to convince me more and more that I completely made this up.
A lot of people say that if they don’t talk about the person in their life that died that it feels like it didn’t even happen. I feel like none of this happened. I never realized how different my inner life and external life could be until this happened to me.
Now the only thing that lasts is my queasiness. I have a new appreciation for it because it reminds me of the sanctity of life and death and that if life is so fragile then death is so possible so it’s completely realistic that everything I went through was true. Maybe I couldn’t make it through the pig dissection, but I could make it through that immense grief so for that I’m lucky to be alive.