Several months ago, I turned 30. For me, this birthday wasn’t the trauma that it seems to be for many people. I relish my three gray hairs. For me they mean experience, wisdom, tolerance.
I don’t feel a maternal clock, and I’ve yet to scout around for Mr. Right. It doesn’t bother me that my knees ache after I run, and the fact that gravity now surfaces in unexpected places is mere fodder for self-deprecating jokes.
What does bother me about my age eclipses marriage and kids and sagging skin; it looms like a portentous umbrella over all that is frivolous or good or happy; it is an ever-present jitter, a gnawing fear.
My mom was diagnosed with cancer at 30. Five years later, she died.
Mine is not an uncommon fear. Psychologists and psychoanalysts include it under the canopy of “anniversary reactions”: a revival of emotions connected to the anniversary of a significant event in one’s life.
For years Elvis Presley predicted that he wouldn’t outlive his mother, who died at 46. His clairvoyance was proved right when Presley died at age 42.
Likewise, Mickey Mantle, whose father had died young, was plagued with a morbid fear of his own impending youthful demise. Surprised that he lived to be 63, he remarked, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would’ve taken better care of myself.” And Ernest Hemingway, whose own father’s suicide at age 57 haunted him for most of his adult life, killed himself with a shot to the head at the age of 61.
According to Dr. Victoria Boies, a Loop-based clinical psychologist, this fear of premature death is not a unique phenomenon.
“It has to do with the unconscious identification that people have with their parents at all levels,” she says. “I talk to people every day who say, I know this doesn’t make sense. I understand the objective truth here, but I feel a different way.’ That’s perfectly normal. It can be problematic, but it’s normal.”
“The stories and anniversaries associated with parents will always have power and meaning because they are an integral part of our own sense of self,” Dr. James Fisch, psychoanalyst at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago and director of the Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program, believes. “This is all part of the process of identification with others, where we internalize aspects of the personalities of people we are close to. Knowledge of how and when a parent died will always have great significance for these reasons. This does not necessarily always cause anxiety, such as the fear of early death or repeating some tragedy the parent suffered. It can also be a source of pride or inspiration.”
In some cases the fear is so prevalent and so conscious — as with Presley, Mantle and Hemingway — that the manner in which people live causes their lives to become self-fulfilling prophecies. All three had problems with alcohol, and Presley was famous for his addiction to prescription drugs.
“One young man I knew was so convinced that he would die at the same age his father did, that he lived with that in mind,” Boies recalled. “He didn’t invest for the future, he didn’t take care of himself physically, and he just had no idea of living into middle or old age. By the time he weighed 400 pounds and smoked like a chimney, he’d made it happen.”
For others, however, the connection isn’t strong enough to govern their lives. Many people either recognize the correlation without it affecting the manner in which they live, or they don’t recognize the parental link until symptoms — physical or emotional — trigger memories.
For example, Fisch says, “If your parent died 20 years ago, you may have forgotten about it and sometimes it catches you by surprise. You find that you’re having some strange reaction (to the anniversary date), some mild symptoms of depression, and suddenly you realize what it is. We’re talking about death, and death is something very literal in people’s minds.”
Stephen Merriman, an Indiana resident who recently turned 40, reacted to his own father’s death from heart failure at 40 by spending much of his life attempting to ignore the passing of time.
“I tried not to think about it,” he recalls. “I’ve missed my own birthdays before, and it’d be two weeks later and I’d remember (them). Now that I’m his age when he died, I can’t believe how young he was; it’s bone chilling. I think I’ll feel some relief at 41.”
It’s the fear, Fisch says, “that sets up the need to push it out of your mind, but making a connection (to the parent) is often very therapeutic, especially if there was much anxiety. . . . When you make the connection, it’s often reassuring; it gives a certain sense of control.”
For Merriman’s brother David, who will be 42 in the fall, hitting 41 brought a sense of relief.
“I had just always assumed I’d go the way the old man did. Turning 40 was the kiss of death,” he says. “Now anything’s possible. Now you can live to be 65 or 70. You’re over the hurdle. You’ve accomplished something that he didn’t, and I guess that’s the biggest fight that you always had, that here’s your dad and he went and died young so you didn’t know what kind of man he ever was. All you knew was what everybody told you in the face of his death, which were wonderful, great things. So you’ve got that ingrained in your mind — that he’s this wonderful man and you’re certainly never going to live up to that. So now that you’re over the hump, it’s a whole different thing.”
Although the negative aspects of early parental death are most commonly researched and reported, such tragedies may also serve as catalysts for living richer, fuller lives.
“I’ve always had a kind of desperation to live,” Stephen Merriman, who is a jazz drummer, said, “to be successful, to do something great. And the clock is running out for that. It’s a sort of existential crisis, a fragile existence.”
Fisch says this response is not uncommon. Often children will live to fulfill a vision their parents had. “It can be a wish to continue a parent’s work or values.”
Hereditary diseases, such as cancer or heart disease, while clearly linked to more obvious physical risks, are often causes for unnecessarily heightened alarm. Dr. Donald Sweet, director of the Opler Cancer Center at Hinsdale Hospital, says a majority of cancers are acquired, not inherited, and that the statistics need to be explained.
“Let’s say you’re the daughter of a woman who got breast cancer at 40,” he says. “You don’t have a huge risk to have breast cancer, although your risk is twice as high (as a woman with no family history).”
Because statistically 1 in 10 women are diagnosed with breast cancer, essentially, that risk would be 20 percent — over the course of an entire lifetime.
By asking five or six questions, Sweet is able to calculate a patient’s risk of getting the same type of cancer as his or her parent based on such factors as race, age, alcohol consumption and family history. What patients need, Sweet believes, “are facts and a plan. It won’t take all the fear away, but it puts it into perspective. Often the facts can be reassuring.”
Hereditary disease isn’t the only source of foreboding on the part of a grown child. Hemingway’s pathological inheritance certainly testifies to this (two of his siblings committed suicide, and his grandfather’s attempt was thwarted by Hemingway’s father).
Even in cases of tragic accidents, adult children can often carry this fear of early mortality.
“It’s not a rational concept, it’s an emotional concept,” Boies believes. “Feelings and thoughts are just very different realms of experience. Cognitions are, hopefully, governed by logic and objective truth and data, but feelings are not.”
Like tragic accidents, suicide often passes on such irrational fears to children as well.
“Suicide is one of those things that leaves such a painful wake,” Fisch says. “It’s some sort of message that everyone’s failed that person. That he or she was totally alone and felt some sort of total rejection. It always leaves a legacy of blame.”
Though fatalistic fear is relatively common, that fear can also take on a variety of forms. For people like the Merriman brothers, identification with a parent becomes even stronger when you have children of your own. Now that he has three sons, Stephen Merriman says thinking of the possibility of his own premature death, particularly in relation to how it would affect his children, is impossible to ignore.
“You can’t help but flirt around with it in your mind, and there is a kind of melancholy or sadness in that,” he says. “It reminds me of one of Michelangelo’s works of Mary holding baby Jesus with an expression of impending doom on her face. She knew what was going to happen to him somehow, so there’s this bittersweet look. That’s kind of how I feel with my kids.”
Likewise, his brother David made sure to have his life in order so that if anything ever happened to him, his children would be provided for.
“My kids would have a lot of things we didn’t have when our dad died; they would be well off monetarily. I feel a little relief having that.”
“(This fear) can also be a guilt thing,” Boies believes. “Are you really entitled to live past when your parent did or have more than your parent had? It’s about exploring what can make you frightened, and sometimes facing those things makes them lose their power.”
Fisch says that often the long-term repercussions of parent loss have more to do with what a child’s relationship was with his or her parent.
Sometimes an anniversary reaction won’t set off any kind of significant or long-lasting depression, and “when it does, there are other complications, other issues in the person’s life.”
For people like Stephen and David Merriman, their father at 40 seems so much older than they feel at the same age. And his presence still looms, three decades later.
“There’s definitely a self-destructive direction that both our lives took because of the situation,” David says. “I don’t know the influence our father would have had on our lives. I think (it) would have made me a better person.”
“It was frightening how unsafe life was then,” Stephen says, regretfully, “that it could change so dramatically at any instant. I didn’t really realize it much (at 10), but I knew something was definitely not right. I knew that he was supposed to be alive.”
As for me, I understand that logic doesn’t govern my own fears, I understand the relatively small risk pool I reside in, and I understand that I am not my mother. But I also know that I felt less fear boarding a Cambodian military flight in a monsoon than when I merely think of having a mammogram. Friends have offered to accompany me, my doctor has written out a referral, my father has told me to stop worrying; I even got so far as to pick up the phone and dial the numbers for an appointment once. And when I was 23 I actually had a mammogram, but back then 30 and cancer and my mother all seemed a lifetime away. I know I must do it again and I will — I joke with my friends that I’ll go on my 31st birthday. Until then, when I attempt to muster the courage to walk through those doors, I see only my mother.
