For as long as I can remember, I have feared snakes.  I have at one time or another in my life feared polio, shots, tall women, death by suffocation, failing a spelling test, asking a girl to go out with me, the atomic bomb, going to weddings where aunts would kiss me, and did I mention women who were taller than I?

I am older now, we have all but eliminated polio as a disease in the world, shots don’t bother me, frankly I seldom run into women who are taller than I, I still become anxious at the thought of drowning, I don’t have to take spelling tests(thank heavens for Spell Check), I’ve learned to live with the bomb, I can now outrun most of my kissing aunts, and most all of my family is through getting married (or at least I hope so as far as my own children are concerned).

So what’s left for me to fear? I’m not concerned with being stalked by lions or Dinosaurs.  Fear has become the 3,000-pound elephant tromping around in my mind. If I ignore it and pretend it isn’t there, I do so at my own risk.  I have never learned to train an elephant.

I AM PROBABLY MORE FEAR-FILLED NOW THAN I HAVE EVER BEEN IN MY LIFE, I am fearful of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I am also beginning to be fearful of my todays.  I am fearful of myself and my ability to know what is going on within and around me.  In fact, it would be easier to list what I am not fearful of:  my grand-daughters, my dog, my garden, the Dali Lama, and a few other people and things.

I spend a lot of time trying to understand the disease process rather than trying to understand my own fear processes.  I am, however, more fearful of my fears than I am of the disease.

I do not fear things outside of me; I fear what is inside of me. I fear I am losing control of what rightly or wrongly I have long thought I was in control of . . . me . . . control of who I am, how I am, how I think, what I think about.  It’s all seems up for grabs now.

A very wise and mostly forgotten friend of mine* once observed that we “awfulize” even the smallest of our fears, some of which aren’t even rational in the first place. It will be awful if I fail this test, don’t get a raise, my children don’t like me, and my hair falls out. So you thought you were perfect, you would get a 10% raise every year you work, your children would love you as you want them to, and all your hair will stay firmly rooted in your head even though your mom’s dad was bald when he was 26? Because of all of these fear driven thoughts I am anxious, anxious all the time. I naturally awfulize, as do you all. But, I have other reasons, other fears to attend to. In fact, others now describe me as agitated, edgy, nervous, unsettled, and upset.

The other day I was standing in line at the airport with my daughter when she, shouted: “Dad would you please stop that?!” Stop what, I asked myself? After pouting for about an hour because one of my own family members had shouted at me in a public place, I asked her why she said what she said, and why she said it the way she said it. (This was the first time she had ever, ever raised her voice to me).

Deep background – I dislike standing in lines, in fact I hate standing and waiting in lines. Ask me to hold a boa constrictor in my bare hands draped twice around my neck and I would seriously consider it, if I never had to wait in another line again.

Apparently when we arrived at the airport there was a long line to get to the ticket counter. Seeing this I began to suggest to all who would listen, ways to shorten the line. Could you ask those agents of first class passengers if they would stoop to allow a few of us from steerage to check in through them? Could they start checking paper work so it could be fixed before they got to the ticket counter – you know, good, sound serious suggestions (These are the only suggestions I can now recall making, apparently there were many, many more that I cannot now recall.) Apparently my free floating, fear driven anxiety raised the volume of my voice, encouraged me to repeatedly make the same suggestions over and over again, and you can probably imagine the other behaviors…….I acted like I was agitated.  I was, but surely not agitated enough to warrant a public reprimand. “Dad! Enough is enough. Stop It!”  How long can even family members tolerate this socially unacceptable behavior?

Honestly I was unaware of the intensity and repetitiveness of my behavior.

I’m not, or at least I wasn’t the type of person who did not take into account the feelings of others when telling them how to do their jobs!  Individuals living with one of the diseases of dementia lose the capacity to fully appreciate the impact of their behavior on others. We lose the ability to self-monitor our own behaviors.  Increasingly, I make choices that are socially unacceptable.

Now what does this long story have to say about me and my fears? About me and who I am, how I feel, why I sometimes react to you the way I do?

I’m trying to explain why I am sometimes mad at you, for no reason apparent to either of us. Why I shout at you when you are trying to do something of value for me or to me? I’m not mad at you.  I’m not mad at anything or anyone. I’m fearful of my own self. I’m anxious about it. I’m fearful of not knowing who I am? What’s going around me? My sense of a lack of control, lack of knowledge of my world and myself. I’m scared, I’m afraid, I’m fearful of my own shadow because I don’t know who that is who sometimes follows me around morphing from a giant to dwarf as I change directions of walking.

So how can you empathize with my situation? You who are still scared of snakes, losing your job, if your hair is falling out, if you have bad breath? I don’t mean to diminish the importance of your fears, I just want you to ponder the ultimate fear, the fear of watching yourself die as you know yourself and as others know you morphing into someone no one knows and perhaps no one including yourself may particularly like or love. I just want you to think about how it feels to be out of control of your thought process, how it feels not to trust what you see, hear, smell,  This is my world. This is what is going on between my ears – some of the time.

We are born fearful of falling and fearful of someone sticking something in our eye. Most all other fears are learned. What happens when we lose the connection between what we first associated the fear with, and the feeling of fear itself? We experience fear in its purest, most fearful form …. fear without a reason. We experience free floating fear unrestrained by evidence or reasoning. We experience unrestrained fear of our own fears.  Spooky isn’t it.

When I act fearful of you what is your response? Why? Does your response help calm or confirm my fears? Do you enable me to overcome my fears? Or do you disable me from overcoming my fears? Do you ignore my fears?  How do you deal with fear in the residents you serve? What fears do you believe they have about you . . .  or what you do . . . or how you do it? What fears do you believe they have about today or tomorrow?

~Richard