978-1572305441

52 A MIND APART
orized the dates of all the fire drills at school and became very anxious
as the time for a new drill approached. His agitation and restlessness
would escalate, and he had more difficulty complying with his mother’s
requests. This was the only anxiety I could see that was present in his
early history and that continued to be a problem. But there seemed little
analogy between this fear and death. The origin of his current anxieties
about death were still a mystery to me, but he did seem to have a propensity
for anxiety, a temperament to react in an anxious way to stress. I
had to seek further for answers. Perhaps thinking more deeply about
the content of his anxieties would help me understand.
* * *
In going over the interview in my mind, I wondered if Zachary was
really anxious about death. Was it really possible that he was upset
about the death of his two great aunts? After all, he had hardly known
them. That he would be upset about his grandmother’s illness was more
understandable since he was quite close to her. Yet he had depersonalized
her in a sense by calling her “Alice.”
After rereading my notes from the interview, though, I realized that
his obsession with death was quite different from what I had expected. I
had taken his anxiety literally, much as one would do with a typical
child worried about death and separation. His concern was not really an
existential anxiety about the nothingness that follows dying; neither
was it a romantic preoccupation with the glorious death of a childhood
hero. He did not seem overly concerned with his own death or with his
mother’s death. There was no grief, no sense of mourning, no anticipation
of the sadness that follows a death. Neither was there an awareness
of the implications of death. There was no confrontation with the impossibility
of knowing what happens after, no terrible wager with God.
Zachary had never heard of Pascal.
Listening carefully to his repetitive questions about family members
and other people connected with his interests, it became clear that
these were not necessarily people he was close to, but more like objects,
small toys off an assembly line. The obsession was not so much with
death itself—the absence, the grief, the process of mourning—but with
change and replacement. Every person had a replacement; the anxiety
involved not knowing who that replacement would be.
This was a death reduced to its simplest, most concrete meaning as
it related to him personally. What looked sophisticated on the surface