Owning Fear, or not...

I always hesitate before posting something which was inspired by a comment, because I absolutely thrive on reading comments, and I am so grateful to those who regularly contribute to this site with their reflections and dialogue.
And so it is that I hope that what follows will inspire a devoted reader (and commenter) to feel proud that she inspired deep thought (which I am prone to) and not self conscious of her words....

The comment was in response to a few posts ago, where I confessed to a moment of panic where fear threatened to surround me during an evening meal. I wrote of the reality of realizing that death could happen right there at my dinnertable, that my daughter could choke and die on the food I was spooning into her mouth. I truly don't think most people would go there, but I did, and here is what one reader commented:

.. don't own fear that you don't need or want to have. Don't accept it. You've already told us that you can go most days without it. So when it rears it's ugly head.. say "i don't accept you. I don't want you. go away." Then make it. Take deep breaths. Thinking that if Aoife had choked on food that it would have been your hand that did it is owning that fear. So why own it??

That, my dear, is a very good question. I have thought a great deal about this, and it reminded me of one day while I was pregnant with Liam, and I had run to my therapist after a night of virtually no sleep. I had been frozen with panic, terrified that the baby had died, unable to sleep and unable to accept, even, that his movements indicated his well being.
The dear, dear woman, who I loved and trusted so much, met my eye, and said, "Is there any way you can just trust this baby? Can you trust that it will be allright?"
Everything in the room turned red, and I exploded.
Trust? You want me to trust? Do you know how it feels to be a person whose child has died on HER watch? Who lay there reading a novel while her daughter was silently suffocating within her womb? Do you know what it feels like to be carrying life; yet know that one hundred percent of your children have died and you could not stop it? Do you know what it feels like to wake up in the morning in my silent house and know I have to live another day as myself, the woman whose baby is dead and will always be dead? Do you know what this feels like? No, no, no. I cannot trust. I cannot trust.
I wanted to trust, truly I did. But I could not. Not then, anyway, and things have changed.

When I first toyed with the idea of not owning the fear, of pushing it away, I thought, yes. This is what it means to NOT have a dead child. To not have a dead child means that when you think about your child dying, and the fear doesn't even quite rise in you, you have the power to make it someone else's problem, to push it away and tell yourself that worrying won't accomplish anything and that the likelihood of the child choking or otherwise dying is so unlikely that it's not meaning much to spend a flicker of a moment worrying about it.

I think I agree with this, that without having truly been slammed with true fear, you can control it. But what I realize I don't agree with is what I used to think, back when I verbally assaulted my gentle, kind therapist, which was that I had no control over the fear. I think what happens now is almost a combination of the two. I neither own, nor disown the fear.
There is no way that I can avoid feeling the fear, when it rises, because I know the fear. It is woven into the grains of my muscles, into each blink of my eyelashes, into each pulse of my heart. When I remember back to the moment that the doctor met my eye and said to me, "I'm sorry, your baby's heart isn't beating anymore, your baby is no longer alive," the emotion that still surges into me like adrenaline is not sadness, or grief, or anger, it is pure, raw terror and fear. It is the icy grip of death on my neck, of knowing that I have fallen victim to something that was always someone else's problem, and that I can't backpaddle my way out of it. It's horror, it's terror, it's fear. It's irreversible. It lives in me, that memory, and that is what I can feel when I think about death ever returning to our household. I know I am not immune.
However, while I can feel the fear so intensely on demand, I also have matured in my grief and mothering process to recognize and accept that the fear will get me nowhere, except into a place which is worse than where I am now. And so while I don't feel that I'll ever be able to reject the fear, and truly disown it, I will refuse to look at it in the eye. I will refuse to let it spend more than a fleeting moment in the conscious recesses of my brain. While I will let the fear influence my decision making to some extent, I will not let it inhibit me from living. I must go on, and I must love life for what it is. Fear will not accomplish anything.

And so, perhaps, I can say this to the fear: I know you are there, and I respect you. You come from an honest place. But I will not let you take away from what I have now. You belong in my life because of what has happened to me, but I will not meet your eye. Fade into my background and live there, as a memory, and please try not to interfere with what wellness and good surrounds me now.