A-Fear Itself

Author: Audacity

Part Of The Joint Collection “AC Presents- Fear Itself: An Exploration”

So, I wasn’t always like this. I used to be much, much worse.

It all started when I was 5 years old, and my father picked me up and leaned us over so I could kiss the dead, cold skin of my beloved grandmother as she lay in her casket at her funeral.

This started a chain reaction of fear of death that to this day, I still partly obsess on when I’m in a deep pit of hopelessness. Which happens more than I care to admit.

Because my biggest fear was really the only fear. The fear in which all other fears are actually rooted. The fear of death. From the moment I kissed my dead grandmother, I became gripped with a terrible knowledge:

“Everyone I know and love will eventually die…and so will I. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

That inevitability, that finality, that truth of truths that hit me like a ton of bricks became my obsession and terrifying fixation right there in that funeral, at 5 years old.

But it wasn’t actually death itself that I was afraid of per se.

It was the unknown answer to the question: what happens AFTER we die?

And the fact that the answer to that question is something no one can know for sure, until it happens to them. And when it does, there is no going back. And THAT was fucking terrifying to me.

A terror that set in my tiny child sized brain in that moment. A chain reaction death fixation of terror that kept me up at night as a child, trying not to die. And frightfully pondering what happens when we do.

Was it hellfire and damnation or angelic heaven as my then fanatical Pentecostal parents said it was? But if it was, how do you know you’ll for sure not go to the place where you burn? You don’t. You can’t. And you won’t. Utterly Horrifying.

In my imagination, I’d create elaborate scenarios that only served to add to my fear, instead of dissuading it. For instance: What if you were already slated for heaven, but then commit a sin and right as you do, before you can pray for forgiveness, you die, and miss the cutoff for number of sins allowed in heaven? And then the devil roasts you, tortures you, and ass rapes you for all eternity?

Yes, I was a strange, almost too bright child. Too smart to NOT be neurotic. A 5 year old Woody Allen. Too smart not to eventually be fucked up too.

But at least I wasn’t Soon-Yi Previn Allen. I mean, imagine having to fuck Woody Allen? That’s a fate worse than death. Pun absolutely intended.

But I digress.

What happens after we die plagued me nearly every night from then on. Well into my adolescence I pondered its mysteries nightly: Was it heaven and hell, as my zealot parents believed? Was it reincarnation like the damned (according to my fanatical parents) Buddhists and Hindus and Krishnas believe? Who knows the truth, and how can I find it too?

Reincarnation is my favorite of the theories. And the kindest belief I think. You didn’t get it right this time? No problem; come back and try again to reach enlightenment and nirvana; along the way you’ll find the same people you’ve always loved too. See? Kind.

Or is it Scientologists with their bridges who have it right and….sorry, I can’t write this with a straight face. Come on, It’s a science fiction story by a failed science fiction writer! Idiots.

Or is it Wicca, or Paganism, or maybe Voodoo or Judaism that have it right?

In my youth I sought out their answers, but they all just turned out to be more “dead” ends.

Then in my tween years, years of double digits, I also surmised that NONE of them knew for sure, they were all just guessing too.

Yet why did some put so much stock in their religions and refuse to look at anything that doesn’t aline with their blind faith?

FEAR OF WHAT HAPPENS AFTER DEATH!

They were just like me. Just more easily delusional and not as honest.

Personally, I really think none of them have it completely right. Because it’s not something that can truly be known until you get there. But more on that in a bit.

Just like I wrote in The Lombardy Hotel part 4, all the religions, whether they admit it or not, they’re all just guessing; and none of them really have the answers any more than I do. But perhaps I actually do know just a bit more than most. More on THAT in a few too.

But there is one that scared me more than anything the others had to offer.

Because the worst one of them all to me? Well, it’s not the hell one believe it or not.

It’s what the atheists believe that actually scares me the most.

You die, and there’s just…nothing. You just cease to exist like you never did in the first place. You’re just…gone. Terrifying to me. TERRIFYING.

So for my entire childhood, I would lay awake begging my grandmother to come see me as a ghost to tell me everything was alright. To calm my fears and reassure me that the afterlife was real, and pleasant, and reincarnation would only happen if you wanted to do it. That you could stick around if you wanted to, and watch over those you love for a while. That there was nothing to fear. That she was ok and waiting for me on the other side. I’d tell her that if she’d just show up, I’d be able to sleep again. But she never showed up.

So instead, from age 5 on, I became a chronic insomniac.

Too afraid to sleep because I might slip away and die.

Of course I no longer believe that (???), but my insomnia is something that to this day, still persists.

Death. The one thing that will happen to us all. Eventually. Inevitably. Irreversibly. Because none of us will make it out of here alive.

Death. The only true unknown; it cannot be bargained with, asked to leave and come back later or never come back at all. It cannot be stopped, it cannot be discovered and figured out beforehand. You have to die to figure it out.

But by then, it’s too late to do any good.

So as I moved into my early teens, what did I do instead? I railed against the fear. Railed against my religious upbringing (which by then my father was fully out of. Thankfully, I got to live with him in the divorce. Because being an only child, I wouldn’t have made it without him).

I even railed against death itself.

As a tween and young teen, I proceeded to immerse myself in death, trying to discover its’ innate secrets. I read books far to old for me. I watched films of the same. Then at 12 or 13, I began a very dark time in my life.

I 24/7 began watching gore videos and real life death, on this new thing called the Internet. And Rotted.com became my new religion.

Anything death I could
find, I was there.

Trying to see and discover the unseeable, the indiscoverable. Trying to find something to believe in. And to just catch a glimpse of it in their dying eyes and faces.

Something. Anything. To tell me what awaits us on the other side.

And let me tell you, I did some wild shit.

Like one time I tried to find a real vampire to turn me so I’d live forever. Turns out he was just a 19 year old goth who liked to sniff and wear girls panties and dress up like Dracula. Not that I was complaining. If he’d turned me I would have given him all my underwear. But alas, he was just insane and kind of a perv. Yeah. I know, I know. Actually the Jury is still out on what exactly was wrong with THAT guy.

I even sought out real life snuff videotapes in police evidence, made by a sadistic serial killer, hoping to see something in their dying faces, something heard on their dying breaths, witness some souls leaving bodies.

Unfortunately, I never got my hands on any, but it wasn’t from lack of trying. I tried like hell.

Did things at 14, or should I say allowed them to be done to ME, that are illegal for adults to do to children for a reason. All to try and catch a glimpse of the unknowable in the last living moments of a serial killer’s victim prostitutes.

It did no good. Everywhere I turned, there was the same thing. Which is, nothing. No actual answers. No actual proof. No actual anything except unfounded doubt and blind faith. Both equally as dumb in my opinion

And don’t even get me started on ghost videos on YouTube. I never had stock in almost any of them. Not because I don’t take stock in the possibility that the supernatural is real. But because people can’t be trusted. People LIE. And because 99.99999% of them are fucking fake. Of course I know this because I DID check them out. And felt very, very stupid when I saw what it was actually all about. The other reason I know when they’re fake? More on that in a minute.

Then in my later teens, after much pursuit and nearly zero results, I gave my death witness search up. And just tried to fuck the thought of death away.

Because being physically beautiful and ultra intelligent really does have its benefits, I didn’t have to try very hard. I fucked whomever and whenever I wanted. I’d go on the hunt, out partying with friends; and by the end of the night I’d be banging the hottest person in the place. Gender was of zero interest to me or of any consequence whatsoever. And threesomes used to literally be my favorite sexual position.

My actual motivation? I didn’t want to get to the end of my life, look back and say “I wish I had done_____ when I was young and had the chance to. Now it’s too late”.

So for years, I went all out, did everything I wanted to, and refused to apologize for it. Not because I thought tomorrow would never come.

But because I knew it would.

I knew that all of it, the pain the pleasure the heartbreak the love the despair the ecstatic, all of it, would someday end. And I would be gone from this earth. Possibly forever.

At least, that’s what I told myself at the time. Because what ACTUALLY happened is, I became a full blown sex addict. Think LVT’s Nymphomaniac 1&2, without all that sensation loss, cake forks, or babies nearly falling out of window ledges.

Truth is, I started doing it because it felt good, and I was just naturally very good AT it, and the escape from my head while being exalted was incredible. Good sex, good fucking, well, it stopped my head from diving down a deep dark well of godamnedmotherfuckingdeathfixation. It helped me ignore my neurosis. At least for a short while anyway.

And, believe it or not, it actually helped me get some actual sleep sometimes.

After all, being painfully aware of my own demise had been my curse for a long time by that point. So even with all the sex, I had probably lost half a lifetime of sleep by that point already.

Only problem was, in the end, I hurt a lot of people I actually cared about with my destructive rampaging. Including myself. But that’s a story for another time.

So the years went by, and the death fixation persisted.

Then I met my current partner, who I’ll just call the most beautiful woman in the world, my true love, my everything, my finance. The person who saved me from the darkness.

And it was while we were together, just talking about things that we’ve experienced in our lives, that I shared a memory with her.

But it would still be a couple of years before she helped me put something together that changed everything, all because of that memory I had shared with her.

Something that had been right there staring at me for years. Something that, for all my supposed intelligence, I had completely ignored the connection of like a total and complete idiot for years. Again. YEARS.

Because I had actually seen a ghost before.

Ok. I hear you laughing. And dismissing what I just said as bullshit. But, I swear it really happened.

Wait, I’ll tell you more. And in the end it will be up to you to decide for yourself. Just like this for all of us. Believe or don’t believe; that’s not my problem. I have enough of them all by myself without making someone else’s problem mine.

So, here it is:

I saw this ghost in the presence of another person, who saw the same thing that I did, at the same exact time. It was just us two inside his locked house, so that I know I hadn’t been hallucinating or dreaming or mistaken or it was another person. I mean the ghost was opaque, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met anyone who has a torso you can see a kitchen light through, have you?

I was 15 when this happened.

And why it never occurred to me at the time, or for many years later, that it was actually the proof of something after we die, the proof I’d been desperately searching for, I don’t know. I don’t know why it didn’t immediately dissuade my fear of death at the time.

But I’ve thought a lot about it, and I think it maybe had to do with my fanatical Pentecostal mother’s childhood influence on me. Because in that religion, there’s no such thing as ghosts. And if you see one? It’s really just a demon, disguised as the ghost of a person, to get you to turn away from god.

But that wasn’t my experience AT ALL. Yes. It terrified me. But it, he (the ghost was a “he”) didn’t actually threaten us or talk to us or approach us at all.

So here lies the brief telling of the time I saw an actual motherfucking ghost. A ghost that became the ACTUAL cure for my constant fear of death fixation…for the most part anyway.

I was 15. My then boyfriend who’ll I’ll just refer to as T, was 18. His parents had left for the week to visit family and he had the house to himself. We lived across the way from each other. I mean you can call where he and I lived our “houses”. But in actuality, they were estates. And his was a proper manor house. A 200 year old manor house. My family’s estate where I lived across the way was originally built in 1899, so not so far off.

So, these homes were old as fuck. And could be as creepy as they were beautiful. There were rooms in my father’s and my ancestral home that no one had been in for years. T and I lived in THOSE kinds of homes.

It was October. And after T and I had satiated our lust for each other’s beautiful, perfect bodies with all the exterior doors locked up tight so we wouldn’t be disturbed, we ordered and were eating take away pizza in the media room where a projection tv was, watching an old film we’d seen many times. Halloween 4: Season Of The Witch.

And singing the Silver Shamrock song along with the film, then laughing like hyenas. Ah T. Sometimes I still miss him. Just for the friendship.

But again, I digress.

We were young and beautiful, and completely without any supervision whatsoever. And that’s exactly how we liked it.

Except for the glow of the movie, the lights were off in the media room. The only light on anywhere near us was in the media room’s bathroom down the hall. And it was shining out into the mouth of the hallway that also led to T’s suite of rooms including his bedroom. We were both on the sofa together, watching the movie, and were positioned to both be able to see the bathroom light shining into the corridor. That’s when I caught movement there, out of the corner of my eye.

I quickly turned my head and glanced at the someone who had just walked out of the bathroom where the light was, then glanced back at the tv.

In my head the brief thought “T’s father is home. I didn’t even hear him come down here”. Then it dawned on me: his parents were far away at that moment. So who the fuck was that?!?!?

I looked back and that’s when I locked eyes with a ghost.

Or should I say I locked my solid eyes with his there not there eyes. And we just…regarded one another. He looked at me with awareness. AWARENESS. He knew we were looking at each other.l in other words. He was not just some imprint photo running on a loop for all eternity. No. There was consciousness there.

Anyway, the light was shining through him but he was still there. Solid and not solid. Almost..smokey. His eyes held the saddest expression that I have ever seen. Still to this day.

Do you know how people say that when you’re really, REALLY terrified, you freeze and time slows down? Well that’s true. It was like it was all happening in slow motion. And I was frozen to the sofa.

And he just stood there, looking.

That’s when I glanced at T, to see if he was seeing this.

And indeed, he was.

He sat there staring at the ghost, a fully formed apparition from head to toe. T’s mouth was agape and his jaw wide open, in sheer astonishment as we both saw the ghost.

I glanced back at the ghost, just in time to see him take one last look at us, then turn away from us, walk two steps, and disappear into a wall.

Suddenly, time sped back up. And I realized I’d been holding my breath.

The experience felt like it went on forever. But the whole thing had only lasted maybe a minute, minute and a half.

That’s when I drew in a huge breath, and with all my might screamed “FUCK THAT!” and literally ran down the stairs and out the service entrance door which backed up to where my home began. T ran out into the night after me.

He thought it was amazing, and was laughing and jumping up and down, clapping. I mean, we’d always suspected his manor as haunted, we’d heard things that alluded to such. But to actually SEE A FULLY FORMED APPARITION AND LOCK EYES WITH HIM? That’s something else all together.

He hugged and kissed me but his obvious wonder and joy was only met with my terror. So inconsolable was I in my fear to go back into his home, I even refused to go back in and get my shoes, which I had kicked off while watching the film. My socked feet were soaking wet from the dew.

He had to go back in and get them, while I waited directly by the door. Then he walked me home. I was too scared to walk across the land and expansive lawn by myself.

It was days before I even set foot in his house again. Weeks before I went back to the media room.

The years went by, and it remained the first, but not the last brush I would have with the supernatural. But all that’s for another time.

Yet still, my fear of death persisted. Until a conversation with my beloved soon to be wife.

Her brother had just died. We were talking about it and everything that goes along with that. Where is his spirit now? Do we even have one? How do we know we go on? How can we know what happens when we die? How do we know there is ANYTHING? How do we know if he’s ok? How do we know we’ll see him again someday? You know, the same thing I’d been trying to figure out since I was 5 years old.

And then she answers me with the answer that changed my life.

The answer I’d searched literally years for. The answer that had been right in front me, also for years. I’m sure you’ve already guessed it, while I had missed it. Again, FOR YEARS.

“Well, we do know there’s something after we die. Because you’ve seen an actual ghost. If there’s just nothing, how could there be ghosts?”

It was literally a lightbulb in my brain skull moment.

OF COURSE!!!!

I’d seen a fucking ghost!!!

“She’s right!!!” I thought. “If we just die and there’s nothing after, how did I lock eyes with a ghost?? A ghost who looked back into my eyes with awareness, and some kind of sentient thought; with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen…and then made the decision to walk through a wall, just to show us he could maybe”?

The fact is, those two things can’t exist together. There can’t just be nothing when we die AND ghosts.

How it never occurred to me that the encounter I’d had as a teen was actually the proof I’d searched for, for years, and that I had seen actual proof of SOMETHING after death with my own eyes, I have no idea.

I think sometimes you have to be really, REALLY smart to be really fucking stupid.

And in that moment, I became an agnostic.

All these many years later since that fateful night as a teen, I no longer fear death. For the most part.

And when my father passed away in 2018, I was devastated. But also hopeful that I’ll see him again someday. On the other side.

Because I was given the greatest gift I think. The greatest gift a living person can receive. When that ghost man looked in my eyes and I looked back.

I was given a glimpse of secret knowledge that most people never get. No matter how long they search for it. I know how lucky I am to have had it.

I often wonder if he showed himself to me because he knew my death fixation was going to nearly destroy me. But I was just too thick to really grasp the sighting’s actual meaning at the time. Maybe.

Maybe it was just luck.

But somehow, it never felt like that. It always felt intentional.

I’m grateful for what he showed me that night, so long ago now. Of course I don’t know everything about what happens after we die.

But all of death’s mysteries are not known by any living person. Including me. What it all means, where we go, how and why we do, is still a mystery and I’m still just guessing. But then again, aren’t we all?

However, despite the unanswered questions, the answered question remains:

We do not end when we die.
We do go on. There is a “something” after all.

Granted, no one living knows what that something IS, but I know for sure it exists; because I’ve seen proof of it with my own eyes. With a witness. So I know it was real.

And in the end, I can live with that…and maybe sleep on it too

Goodnight to all. And to all the good dead, goodnight.