Fear: A Eulogy

Mac sits before us on the stage, suddenly smiling with the apparent arrival of a grand idea. “Alright,” she says, “everyone take out a piece of paper.” As some kids reach into their bags, she rolls her eyes, “figurative,” she says, as if it should have been obvious. Her smile returns and we all hold our hands up and pretend to hold pens, preparing to write. “Now,” she says, “write down whatever you are afraid of today. Whatever worries you have, whatever could go wrong.”

We scribble on our hands with imaginary ink. After a few long moments, she orders us to throw them up at her. We do, with enthusiasm, and she pretends to catch them all in a basket. After we’ve all thrown our imaginary slips of paper at her, she sets the basket carefully beside her, and clears her throat. “We are gathered together today,” she begins, to the delight of the company, who laugh giddily at our makeshift funeral, as she continues, “to bury our fears.” We cheer. We’re an excitable group.

“It’s hard. It’s emotional,” she says, and I’m struck by the truth of the words. “But we’ll find strength. In fact,” she holds up a finger and smiles thoughtfully, “we might even find happiness.” We all laugh and cheer again, and the words ring with the truth I’ve come to find, and at the last minute she decides to cremate the papers instead of bury them. It’s really quite smart, when you think about it, because fire is cleansing, and also entirely destructive, and the fears will be transformed instead of hidden, and they will never be dug up. I mean, if you want to go to town with the symbolism, fire’s really the way to go.

Being the drama teacher she is, she pretends to hold up a blowtorch, and, making a fantastic sound effect, lights the fears aflame.

It’s what I’d been trying to do for so long now; destroy fears. I wonder if that’s what I’ve done to myself… in order to find comfort, I tried to eliminate my worst parts, the parts that made me guilty. And it was so hard, but I forced myself to become better, which somehow made me less afraid. By doing that, by cleansing and destroying, I was able to burn away my fears.