Mike, a good friend of mine from grad school, writes a fantastic weekly column, The Casual Casuist, and recently posted about fear. His story is about claustrophobia and elevators and facing fear between the top two floors of a 15-story building in downtown San Francisco and prying open metal doors—prying open the fear itself—with bare hands. His overall point is about much more than all that and I encourage you to read the full story. His piece has me thinking about fear because I’ve faced one of the worst fears I think a mother could.

 

Notice the hearts in this one?

 

At first, I thought I had fear licked. Anything like it (anxiety, worry) just sort of went away. I no longer feared what I had before: letting go, flying ever so high in the sky, accepting the dependent visa issued by my husband’s company and writing full-time without apology, crying in public, saying what needed to be said or not saying a word because there was no longer a point. It was part of the priority realignment that took hold of our lives and gave us different versions of what did and did not matter.

 

 

I suppose I thought the loss would make the fear something I had conquered, but it’s crept back in the way it does when the random, worst thing has happened and then, to a different degree, happened again. Of course, things go wrong. Of course, there’s no reason. Of course, misfortune doesn’t discriminate. Of course, it could happen again. That’s not to say we should live expecting the other shoe to drop, but it also means I don’t believe anyone who claims to know otherwise. We don’t know. None of us do.

 

 

I should be at home with the unknown. I’ve spent two years fairly comfortable with the idea of inevitable, yet unpredictable change. We live here based on the premise that we could live anywhere and may have to depending on where the work is. But the most popular questions to date are still: “How long will you be in Chile?” and then, “Where will you go next?” The difference is I thought I didn’t have the answers to those questions in particular. It turns out I don’t have the answers, period.

 

 

When we signed up for this, it was all an adventure of starting our lives together and interesting people to meet and countries to see and perspectives to shift. It still is, but there’s an inertia and a new apprehension, I’ll say, around change because the grief is so thick. Because everything is different when you live abroad, the grief, should it become a part of everything, is different, too. Your family is far away. Your coping mechanisms align with where you are and what you have—a pup to love, the comfortable neighborhood to walk, the words to find in the language you can find them in, the consistency of what was recently unfamiliar now feeling like home, the sudden tears over a long-distance video chat and the real contact somewhere in the cyberspace between.

 

 

It can surprise people when they figure out I’m still crying, regularly. That the “bad” days still challenge the “good” though I don’t think “good” or “bad” are helpful concepts here. “Did something happen?” they ask. Triggers do exist, but most of the time I cry because of what already happened, nine and then four months ago now. Lorenzo, then someone else, are already gone.

 

 

Fear serves its purpose, I realize. It shows us what we care about and where the edges are. We push against it to understand where the strength comes from. I suppose my real question is this: So often we believe the end goal with fear is facing it, but what about living with the fear faced? That’s where I’d give anything for some metal doors to pry open. Still, I have to find a way through.