Anxiety and death

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By Anon

The distress I feel is insurmountable. The peak began around a month ago, when my grandma suddenly passed. However, it has been a longstanding issue. Death, dying, loss.

Anxiety (1) - The distress I feel is insurmountable. The peak began when my grandma suddenly passed. However, it has been a longstanding issue. Death, dying, loss.

Death is a natural part in the process of life, but what happens when you’re overexposed? I think my current experience is a product of that. When I was young, my exposure began in the form of my great grandparents passing. As a teen I lost a good friend aged 15 to terminal illness. Aged 17, I cared for my grandparents until my grandfather lost his cancer battle two years later. Then, after a great deal of hard work, I started to work as a home support worker. This was a job I was proud to do, happy mostly. Until palliative care. Things calmed slightly when I began working in healthcare clinics, until once again death had crept up. I would be in the room when people received the terrible news that they would not recover from their ailments, that they were terminally unwell.

It is a privilege to care for those in such circumstances, but an uncomfortable privilege at that.

I have seen too much

Again, my discomfort reached an all-time high when beginning to work on the acute areas. Seeing people in such awful situations, seeing people experience suicidal ideation like myself. Experiencing feeling suicidal whilst caring for others and feeling all sorts of screwed up for how life works like that. How could I be so ungrateful for my existence? When people before my very eyes were inconsolable because their time was nearly up.

I have seen too much.

I have seen infants, adults and everyone between nearing their ‘time’.

Now I want to live, I am terrified. Now I have built a life for myself, one that for the most part I want to live, I am so scared it’ll be ripped away from me. Worse than that, I worry about the ones I love most being plucked from me before I get to go. My life’s current trend suggests this to be the case. I fear that when I see people, like my parents, beautiful baby sister or my husband, that it could be the last time. That I don’t have enough photographs with them, I haven’t done enough for them, that I haven’t done enough to make them proud. That maybe I haven’t said I love you enough.