Fear and Loathing in Lincoln-Part One

“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle.

I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.”

--Mother Teresa

I was never so afraid in my life.  Fear, anxiety and panic were my constant companions and violent intruders throughout the first weeks and months after Anne's death.  One day it occurred to me that I had observed this experience in others at close hand.

I remember working with the children of Katrina a year after the hurricane left greater New Orleans devastated and desperate.  Some of these children had seen people die on interstate highway overpasses.  Some had lost close family members in the flood waters.  Nearly all of them had lost their homes, their clothing, their toys, their schools, and their neighborhoods.  Most of their friends were living in other states with family, friends or strangers. 

Their realities had been completely disrupted, washed away when the levees broke.  I wonder if they will ever again find life safe and trustworthy.  Whatever simple trust they might have had was blown out to sea with the rest of their lives.

I found myself wanting to call everyone I love a dozen times a day.  After all, my wife of thirty-one years left me without so much as a good-bye (no fault of hers, of course).  How could I know that others wouldn't leave just as quickly—sons, siblings, friends?  At first I couldn’t help myself—phone calls, text messages, emails, Internet chats, anything to maintain a real-time connection just to make sure they were still there.  That anxiety remained for months, but I gradually learned to re-focus the fear and to tame the monster most of the time.  

When the anxiety rises in my chest, I begin to breathe deeply and to pray a new breath prayer that works well: “Lord Jesus Christ, save me and heal me.”  A few minutes of that breathing gets my brain re-oxygenated and my mind re-rooted in reality.  It seems that my loss created a kind of low-level post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It was one for which the treatment is not complicated, but the symptoms are all there: the tightness in the chest, the shallow breathing, the tunnel vision, the catastrophic thinking, and the cycling into deeper and deeper panic.  Now I know what those Katrina kids experienced, at least in some small way.

Even the most difficult of the children in our care had some tender things in common.  They loved to sit on our laps and be held close and safe.  They loved to wrap themselves in blankets, even when the temperature and humidity were both in the nineties.  When they took naps, most of them could only rest under a table or chair.  They couldn’t sleep out in the open, even in a closed room.  

The sense of nakedness was too great for them to tolerate.  For me, it was and still is a comfort to spend time with other people—not really in conversation, but rather just in proximity.  It didn't and doesn’t really help to constantly discuss how I am.  My emotional temperature doesn’t necessarily change that much from moment to moment.  But I found some relaxation and focus simply by having other people in the room, people I know and trust.  They were my blanket and my respite from fear.

Those of you who are grieving--do you have any similar experiences?