GRAVE CONCERNS
I WOULD HAVE BEEN five years old when it happened, tucked up in the lower tier of the bunks I shared with my older brother. We always talked before nodding off, usually about fun stuff. But on this night he chilled me with four words.
“You’ll die one day.”
While I intuited the statement’s truth, I’d never thought about this before. On the edge of tears I went looking for a parent.
“Every living thing dies eventually,” my dad said mildly. “But you don’t have to think about this for a very long time.”
Based on what I know now about how best to talk to kids about death, my father did all right that night. He was honest and plain-speaking, if a little too quick to close down the topic. Unfortunately, my fear of death didn’t go away. On the contrary, it intensified over the years to the point of spoiling a good part of my childhood. The nightly news was a frequent trigger: any mention of natural disasters, escalating superpower tensions, escaped prisoners, people getting cancer, climate change, funnel-web spiders or, yes, disease outbreaks would tighten my stomach and fill me with dread. Though I developed a few ways of dealing with my anxiety, these, I would come to see, were all textbook symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Every bit as strong as the fear was the sense of loneliness because I hid everything about what I was feeling.
Of course, that concealment was misguided. Any kind soul would have pointed out that this fear of mine was natural and, to some extent, universal. Some feel it more viscerally than others. Some deal with it more directly, more wisely. But for everyone, the realisation that we are, as anthropologist Ernest Becker put it, “a small, trembling animal
