You don’t just choose a crippling fear of abandonment as a quirky lifestyle, like being a goth or an introvert. Something happens first – usually (but not exclusively) the death of or separation from a parent during childhood.
Starting around the 7th grade, I experienced a string of deaths in my family. Big deaths. Important people. Even those who were maybe less important died in such spectacular and unsettling fashions that it stuck with me anyway. First up was my grandfather on my dad’s side. (My grandparents on my mom’s side were dead before I made it out of kindergarten. Shout out for sparing my feelings, you two.) He was a lifelong smoker who was diagnosed with throat cancer in his mid-70s. There wasn’t a whole lot they could do besides let him die in peace. He did that from a hospital bed placed squarely in his living room. I lived with my grandparents at the time, which meant that for the next few months, I watched him die. Slowly.
If there was a bright side, it’s that we weren’t especially close. I cried a lot, but I think I was mostly just sad for my grandmother, who was the closest thing I had to a best friend at the time. I knew she was sad, and it made me sad. Four months after he passed, my grandmother died as well. We were all gathered in the living room, getting ready to go to Red Lobster, when she suffered a stroke right there in front of us. I was looking at her when it happened, and I can still see her eyes rolling in the back of her head and everything else about that moment vividly. She slipped into a coma and never came out of it. She was gone two weeks later. I wasn’t excited about going to Red Lobster either, but fuck, Grandma. Way to overreact.
“6 Reasons Fear Of Abandonment Will Ruin Your Life” by Adam Tod Brown
Speaking from experience, this is a great great article.
