"Out, Brief Candle!" Death and the Universal Dread: Athazagoraphobia

Of all the sins, despair is considered one of the very worst, because despair by its very nature is the absence of hope. Despair tends to suck away at the meanings we've constructed to make sense of our routine sufferings. This amplifies our existing doubts, tempting us toward nihilism and fatalism. It ignores, rejects and counsels against the hopes we may have. If (like me) you're a person of faith, then you have hope of redemption, hope in salvation, hope in God's existence and mercy, and hope that ultimately love will outlast death and every other evil. To harbor despair in one's heart implies a rejection of hope (or at least a strong doubt) in God, which is not good. But this past week, following a death in the family, I felt that despair weighing down on my heart and mind, and I've struggled to resist it. So, I decided to just write about it.

Early-morning phone calls at my house almost always mean bad news - the kind of news that leaves you shaken and brooding over the big issues of death and loss. Dwelling on these issues at length can lead us to realize how we've forgotten those we've lost, and to fear that we too will be similarly forgotten one day. Today's word sums up this primal anxiety: athazagoraphobia, the fear of being forgotten or ignored, or the fear of forgetting in general. But allow me to backtrack a bit: this post is about a strange word, yes, but it's also about a personal loss: my grandfather - Konrad "Rado" Kapus - who passed away Monday, September 30th. I chose the word athazagoraphobia in light of his death, because it fits; I want to make sure he's not quickly forgotten, and I'm using this platform to do so. I didn't want to lament on facebook because a) no one likes a facebook "bleeder," as one of my friends calls it, and b) because a facebook post could never do justice to his life. A sentence, a click, and it's all over - one more fleeting, consumable blip on an ever-scrolling newsfeed - and that's just not good enough. Far fewer people will read this than my facebook posts, but it's worth giving my grandpa a more meaningful sendoff. So, if you'd indulge me, I'd like to preserve my grandfather's memory in a personal way and dispel the symptoms of athazagoraphobia that have hovered with me this week.

My mom's dad lived in a picturesque little town called Vransko, in the small alpine country of Slovenia, just south of Austria. He was born near there in 1923, and my mom was born there in 1957. She says her family was poor, but too happy to be aware of it. They rarely had money to afford meat or sweets, let alone toys or new clothes. But their father was the church sacristan, janitor and choirmaster, and a tailor who worked from home, so they never lacked for visitors - neighbors, clergy, relatives from the nearby farms. My mom and her siblings kept busy and found fun outside in the woods, hills and farms surrounding Vransko.

                                                     A hiker's view of Vransko.

Fast-forward to the present. My mom has now lived in America longer than she had once lived in Slovenia. Skype has allowed her to see her dad and her brother each day for the past few years - a great comfort, providing a literal window back home. We'd heard via Skype on Sunday that grandpa was sick after eating something that didn't agree with him. But he'd always been a hardy man who ate healthy, kept physically active and weathered any illness with a tried-and-true home remedy. He was naturally resilient and sure to recover. But at 6:00 a.m. the next day, the house phone rang: steady, robotic, ominous. Instinctively I knew it would be bad news from Slovenia thanks to the seven-hour time difference. Voicemail kicked in, and my uncle's deep baritone voice intoned, hollowly: "...Ate je umrl." *Click*

"Dad's died." Just like that, and nothing more. Within seconds, my mom had run downstairs and replayed the message, gasping and crying, repeating it aloud to herself as if to make sense of it. It was news she'd dreaded for a long time... it meant she no longer had either of her parents, and that she was too far away to have done anything about it. It seemed like such rude news - an unexpected, unwelcome heartbreak without reason or context. For that first split-second when emotion temporarily overruns logic, I actually felt angry at my uncle for waking us just to say, "Dad's died," so curtly. How could this happen... he just had a little food-poisoning - an irritating stomach issue. He couldn't just be dead!

But the truth is, death comes unexpectedly, turning off the lights and ripping the curtains from the neatly-planned stage show we often think we're starring in. It doesn't wait for the right time. When it arrives, death overrides our schedules, changes our plans, interrupts our conversations and forces us to take stock of ourselves with a challenging question: do our lives really amount to anything? My immediate reaction to this death was anger and a feeling of being vaguely disrespected by the sudden loss: Grandpa wasn't allowed to be taken from us yet. But of course, mine was a childish, self-centered reaction, because in the grand scheme, there's no rhyme or reason to death, and anger over the loss only betrays a lack of understanding about it.

As it turned out, my grandpa's heart simply gave out. He was 90 and it was his time. After a day of bed rest without being able to hold any food down, he grew increasingly weak and unable to speak, and his body finally slowed down and succumbed. That my grandpa was the nicest guy in the world didn't do a thing to improve his chances of surviving another day. That all of Vransko had recently turned out, It's a Wonderful Life-style, to celebrate his 90th birthday in honor of all he'd done for the parish and the town - suddenly that didn't mean anything either. He may have been a selfless, faithful, and beloved man, but he's gone now, and people will continue on with their lives without him. Vransko will slowly change, and someone else will take his house. His memory will linger with those who knew him, but after they also pass? He'll join the ranks of the countless generations of unremarkables who never make the history books. For every Pharaoh, there were thousands of anonymous slaves who died making his monuments. For every Napoleon, there were thousands of infantrymen who died as cannon fodder building his reputation. My gut emotional response was that it's not fair - not fair that my grandpa's joined those nameless dead now. He did so much good for others in his life, but he likely won't be remembered beyond my generation. It reminded me of Shakespeare's sobering final soliloquy in Macbeth:

...Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5)

The harsh reality is that "all is vanity" - we're only here a little while, after which our contrived little goals, problems, triumphs, and achievements quickly fade from memory. The stage goes dark and the people leaving your new gravesite might as well be patrons leaving a theater after an agreeable but forgettable show: the next morning, its plot details are a fuzzy afterthought, soon replaced by more pressing matters. That troubled me today. Which brings me back to our word: athazagoraphobia.

If our ultimate end is death, then our universal fear is athazagoraphobia: the fear of being forgotten, left behind, erased from thought and mind. The word is a medical term for a specific mental condition, but I think it also connotes a very primal, childlike fear of abandonment that we all recognize - any child whose mother briefly vanished from sight in a department store has felt it. It's a fear that never quite leaves us, and it resurfaces during times of loss. I can't find the official origin for this word other than the obvious medical origin, due to the Greek roots it mashes together, because it's more of a clinical construct than a literary word. Phobia is "fear," of course.  Thanatos means "death," hence the "tha-" in the word. Agora simply means a public place - so perhaps it ties into the fear of being isolated from the public, effectively cut off and ignored by others.

I wonder how severe my own fear of being forgotten is... I feel it acutely in the wake of my grandfather's death. This site says such fear is not truly athazagoraphobic unless the sufferer constantly dwells on being forgotten to the point of irrational anxiety and panic attacks. So, I guess I don't have it. (Whew.) But surely a more "normal" fear of abandonment affects us subconsciously. Does a person's social media, facebook or blog activity directly correlate to their fear of being ignored or forgotten by others? I don't know. I do know that I'm an active facebook user, and now, blogger. I'll also admit that being left out, forgotten, ignored or unrecognized is one of my least favorite feelings... I remember being particularly chilled by the fates of the poor guys locked away and forgotten for years in The Cask of Amontillado or The Count of Monte Cristo. And as a "creative," a "performer," and a "people pleaser" naturally inclined to love attention, I've always desired to leave a good memory and elicit positive responses from people I've met. Like many people, I also hope to leave something behind - a writing or a creation to be remembered by. And I identify deeply with songs and artworks that go a bit over the top on that heavy subject. Maybe these desires are symptomatic of my personality and individual fears, but I suspect they're present in all of us. Maybe that's partially why we blog and use social media in the first place. Who knows? The late, great songwriter Warren Zevon poignantly captured our universal ache before his own death, with "Keep Me In Your Heart For Awhile":

                                  

But as a person of faith, I don't need to believe that death is our ultimate end. In times like these, I'm comforted that God never forgets us, and that athazagoraphobia and all other phobias are tiny, self-centric distractors that shouldn't hinder me from remembering my purpose: to embody and share the love that I believe is God. This should be my focus, not some preoccupation with what can't be helped. If it's true that "perfect love casts out all fear," then I know the best way to counteract azathagoraphobia is to occupy myself with loving, and to re-focus on other people. More concretely, this involves devoting more time to volunteering, listening to friends, helping with charities, doing works of mercy - occupying my mind with love of neighbor rather than obsession with self. I know my grandpa lived that way, so he probably wasn't too busy worrying about being forgotten at the end. Thanks to his good deeds, I like to think he won't be forgotten on this earth anytime soon.

So goodbye for now, to Rado Kapus - my beloved "stari ate" (literally "old dad") - who stayed young all his life, who walked with a limp from a childhood machinery accident, who could walk on his hands and stand on his head well into his fifties, who always wore a smile and a mischievous glint in his eye, who always saw the bright side, who loved music and taught himself to play the accordion and zither, who wrote and sang folk songs and hymns, who loved his garden, who took devoted care of his wife after a debilitating stroke for over 10 years, who gave away most of his money, who regularly maintained and cleaned his church without pay, who sent us homemade coats and pants on birthdays... and whom I sadly never got to know, on much of a personal level. In our limited time together during visits and with the language barrier caused by my limited Slovenian, I'm not sure I ever expressed to him how much he fully meant to me - how much I admired and loved him. I hope this blog post somehow makes up for it. In spite of the gnawing feelings of loss, I have faith and hope that I'll see him again and be able to express everything I couldn't say in the past. Until then, I'll keep him in my heart for awhile, as will anyone who reads this, if only for a moment.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of Rado Kapus, Marija Kapus, and those of all the faithful departed rest in peace. 

                                      Rad te imam, Stari Ate; nebom te pozabil!

As always, thanks for visiting if you got this far. My next post won't be this heavy or personally indulgent.