Dread Takes Several Forms

Dread takes several forms. It offers us an emotional range that begins with something slightly more acute than mere dislike and extends to a paralyzing fear of death.
Of course, death is at the bottom of it. Should we find ourselves disconcerted by the arrogant swagger of a grimy man in a loose-fitting overcoat making his way through an enclosed space, it could be because we think it’s possible he will pull out a long gun and spray the room with buckshot. If looking in the mirror we are repelled by a new abundance of gray hairs, or if we sense a collapsing vertebra as we walk the dog, it might be because such developments signify that we are a step or two closer to the abyss.
Tonight, though, dread came unexpectedly, and not because I feared my own demise. No, my dread—my wide-eyed moment of horror—was provoked by my 9-year-old daughter, Zoe, who I could see had, for the first time, truly comprehended the nature of mortality. Probably it was not a conscious awareness, a concrete thought in her mind that revealed the black beyond, but undoubtedly the shock and fear she expressed after a simple joke went mildly awry only could have been the reaction of someone whose life experience had just expanded enough to include a clear sense of the finite. It is a small trauma to recognize in one’s young child a nascent ability to recognize death—to recognize it and to fear it.
It was bedtime. I was lying next to her preparing to read a little from a collection of folk tales by Hans Christian Andersen. As usual, we were jostling, tickling one another, laughing, and throwing stuffed animals around before she settled down for deep sleep.
I placed her alarm clock at a distant corner of the small table in her room and joked that this would force her to get out of bed to turn it off when it beeped at 6:30 in the morning, an hour we both resented with all our might, but which demanded our respect lest the school bell beat us to the punch.
“Noooo, Dad, please,” she said, trying to get out of bed.
I told her I could probably reach it.
“Without touching the floor,” she said admonishingly.
I stretched, I reached, I quickly understood I would need to prop myself up with one arm while extending the other toward the clock. I gripped the bed frame with my right hand and moved the other hand across my body, my torso hanging over the edge. Of course I lost my balance and, with a thump and a smile, landed, back down, on the floor, narrowly missing the rounded corner of a little wooden commode.
Zoe froze with fear, managed to ask me if I was OK, then burst into tears and rushed to embrace me. Quickly I assured her I was fine, that the fall was not profound, that no pain was associated with it and that this was only a joke.
“But I thought you hit that corner,” she said, gasping. She thought I was injured; she thought my health, my wellbeing, my life was in danger. She had glimpsed an inevitably lonely future. Back on the bed, I reassured her. She snuggled close, placing her head on my breast. This is when I realized what had really happened. This is when the dread set in.
Nine years ago, when Zoe was born, our joy was overwhelming. It was a difficult pregnancy, and parenthood had been very much in question for several years. That our daughter emerged into the world was miraculous enough, but her beauty and fine temperament only added to our bliss.
But every bliss, in order to be bliss, must contain a note of dread. Ecstasy, as the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini knew so well, is what one feels the moment love’s arrow pierces the flesh, the consuming sensation whose ingredients include agony, like water so scalding it momentarily feels cold to the touch.
I remember the day soon after Zoe’s birth, before she could sleep through a night, when guilt and pain set in, for I realized I was partly responsible not only for what happiness and success my daughter might achieve in her life, but for any distress she might endure, for certain inevitable disappointments, for unavoidable suffering—and, ultimately, for her death.
I was especially mortified not at the idea that she would one day die, but that I would surely die so much sooner, that I would not be there to help her, to hold her, to try to comfort her, to love her. Oh cruel trick! To grant someone life only to abandon her in her time of greatest need! It is a thought I still cannot bear.
And lying in her bed, with the thick tome of folk tales resting on my gut, my worst fear was partly realized. My daughter, so full potential—her life still at its beginning, her thoughts enlarging, her awareness growing, her confidence blooming—my 9-year-old daughter was, in a sense, already beginning to die. True, she could not yet see the end, or imagine it with the calm rationale of a satiated materialist. But she now knew of the end, and that her path inexorably would take her there.
Awareness of a process tends to set it in motion. For a father, who can travel with his daughter only part of the way, this is no easy matter. It fills me with dread.

Adam Parker
Jan. 6, 2010