Grief and Fear: A Shared Skin
I am a young widow, hospice and palliative care nurse, death doula and guide, and grief care professional who writes about all things death, dying, and grief from a radical and authentic perspective.
C.S. Lewis writes in A Grief Observed that:
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep swallowing.”
Fear is one of the primal emotions grief brings to the surface—and worse, grief keeps fear at the forefront of our lived experience for quite some time. It also serves to limit our ability to seek out change and allow life to transform post-loss. Yes, I said transform. Whether you like it or not, your life will transform if you lose an anchor person from your life. A spouse. A child. A parent that you were very close to. Whoever it may be. Your dog.
At the threshold of this forced transformation, you will have a choice. Who writes the narrative? Who, or what, has control? Who makes the decisions? Living inside your fears and anxieties while grieving might be easier, but I am here to tell you that pushing into the fog, the uncertainty, and stepping off the cliff trusting the next step will be there has not only helped me, but may also be the one thing that has allowed me to find moments of actual connection, joy, and happiness again.
So let’s talk about grief and fear, and the concept of fear as a tool towards integrating your loss and this new life you have not consented to, but is here to stay anyway.
When the Unthinkable Becomes Personal
Initially, fear surfaced for me in the broadest, most surreal way: suddenly, the worst thing had happened.
Not to a stranger.
Not to someone I was supporting.
To me.
The very worst thing imaginable had become my lived reality. My person—my partner—was gone.
It didn’t matter that statistically this was improbable. It happened. And it could happen again.
As someone who had worked with death and dying for years, I assumed I had already integrated this reality. My father had died. I had lost many people close to me. I thought I was prepared. I thought I understood loss. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was unprepared to be unprepared.
Once the statistics no longer matter, literally everything becomes a possibility in the game of “how can life get any worse?”. You learn to never taunt the will of the universe by asking that question. You wait in desperate anticipation for the next shoe to drop. Constantly. It is exhausting and relentless in early grief, especially when the person you lost died traumatically. Or suddenly. Or you watched it happen.
No One Tells You
My healthy, 51-year-old husband died in 2022. It was a grueling march through respiratory failure, ventilators, lung infections, blood clots, and strokes. When we removed the breathing tube, he barely made a sound. His lungs were destroyed, and he was dead in seconds.
One Saturday we had a normal day. The following Sunday he was sick. And he would never get better. Only worse. Horrible decision after horrible update. It rolled on like some nightmare I wanted to wake up from. Day after day, sleepless night after sleepless night.
Nearly a decade of life vanished in an instant, he flatlined, and they whisked him to the OR for organ donation.
His sons and I gathered our things in the ICU like zombies. No one spoke to us. No one met our eyes. Apparently, our pain was too much to look at.
And yet somehow, we walked out of that hospital and made it home. The drive an hour of stunned silence, disbelief, and emotional paralysis.
No one tells you what it’s like to watch your spouse die.
No one tells you what it feels like to walk into your once-happy home for the first time and feel… absolutely nothing.
Your mind cannot reconcile that the person who filled that space will never come back. You exist in a void for a long time. When your brain and heart finally meet in some dusty corner of your soul and ask, “Now what?”—you just shrug and stare at the walls.
The Void
For a long time, nothing feels like home.
Not your house.
Not your work.
Not your family.
Not your hobbies.
Not even your own thoughts.
It’s as if you’ve landed in a foreign country. Only that strange place is your very existence. You can’t understand until you’ve been there. I’d say I hope you don’t, but that means you leave someone else in that space. It’s a no win situation. We’re all racing towards it, we just don’t know it. Why don’t we talk about this honestly?
Early Grief as a Fear Response
Grief mimics fear. You’re in fight-or-flight, stuck in the sympathetic nervous system.
But unlike being chased by a predator, grief doesn’t give you a clear threat to outrun. You don’t know what’s coming, only that everything feels unsafe. I’d rather be chased by a lion than go back to those early days of grief.
People describe it as:
“I want to unzip my skin and run away.”
“I’ve lost my sense of self, home, and safety.”
Losses that are out of order—spousal death, trauma, the theft of expected time—rip apart our grounding. We feel adrift, unmoored, untethered.
It’s a full-body, full-soul experience. One of the most disorienting states a human can inhabit. Finding your way through it is daunting. You must exist in it for a time. There is simply no avoiding it. Eventually though, you can and should find ways to step out, back into the present. Back into the living world.
The Physical Toll
Your body remains locked in fear:
Your senses are either sharp or dulled to nothing.
Digestion stops.
Heart rate spikes.
Palpitations come and go.
Anxiety mimics illness.
Sleep is elusive (waking up in the morning is worse).
It creates a closed loop: your body senses fear, responds to it, creates symptoms, which then confirm your fear. Around and around you go.
Naming the Fear
Eventually, some of the shape-shifting fear begins to clarify.
For many, it's the fear of being alone. For me, it wasn’t the day-to-day solitude that frightened me, it was the idea of being emotionally and spiritually alone for the rest of my life.
I’d spent years finding the kind of love I had in my marriage. The idea of trying to do that again—at 43—was terrifying. And so was the possibility that I might never find it again.
Other fears surface. How do I keep the bills paid? How do I manage to go back to work and help other people die? How do I fix this fucking hot water heater? How do I do life without my safe person by my side? What if I get sick?
The Life That No Longer Fits
Soon, I realized another fear: the fear of staying trapped in a life that no longer fit. A life built for two—but lived alone.
Weeks after he died, I felt it. That deep knowing that told me:
This is no longer your home. This is no longer your life.
I considered selling the house. Leaving the state. Letting go of our things. Not as an escape, but as a step toward something new.
People do not like this. Let me tell you. The people in my life did not react well to me telling them, mere weeks and short months into this new shit storm of my life, that I was going to make changes.
I was told I was escaping (ummm, yes). Why is escaping bad exactly? I asked this literal question. How is it that people think they know what you need? Why shouldn’t I escape this hell? The worst thing imaginable just happened to me, remember? Tell me again why I should sit here in this rubble and wait? Why do I need to heal here?
The Urge to Flee
Many people grieving report this instinct—to run.
It’s why “don’t make big decisions for a year” became gospel. But here’s the thing: sometimes, it’s not about fleeing in fear. Sometimes, it’s about pursuing something necessary.
One of the ways this started to clarify was in finding myself able to daydream and manifest some new vision of life moving forward. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I believe this to be one of the core tasks that a griever must find their way to as they begin to integrate the reality of their loss into their lived experience. Giving yourself permission, conscious or not, to start to consider that living will continue, and that you alone have the power to create this future life in your own rendering, begins to reclaim control. Control that was lost and decimated during the prior times of trauma that happened TO you starts to cede to the blank slate of the present and future that you get to decide FOR you.
My visions started to include a totally new locale, a new climate, a new rhythm of life, and an abandonment of the confines of what life had been in the past. Even though I loved those confines that included life on a large rural property with my late husband, our horses, the management of the land, all the things we owned, the hobbies we had. All of it. I did love it, with him. Without him, it felt overwhelming, empty, and pointless. Moreover, I had the deep sense that staying there was going to hold me in some kind of “ghost life”, going through the same patterns of living we had done together, alone, awaiting his return in some false narrative that I simultaneously knew wasn’t going to happen but deeply wished could be so.
The question that is begged here is this. How many people have these feelings of wanting to reshape their lives during that immediate post-loss period, or within that initial year and beyond, and they stifle their internal voices and bend to the whims of a grief “rule” established by someone else in some other time and situation? Obviously for some, this is still good advice, if that feeling of fleeing or making big change is being driven primarily by avoidance and denial. For others though, like me, that desire for change was rooted in something else, something more akin to purposeful action and an intuitive sense that change was necessary for healing and integration of the loss itself. What happens if someone who authentically needs change early on in their grief goes against their instincts and stays rooted? Or even outright avoids opportunities for change when they present themselves out of fear and worry of regret later, simply because we have developed a one size fits all rule about that first year? What if that window closes, the one that is forced open in our vulnerable yet powerful post loss selves, that allows for radical reshaping of our world? What if we wait for safety, and instead find only stagnation, and worse we realize the fear is all still there anyway?
Am I running away? Or running toward something?
The Shoveling Incident: A Reckoning
I remember the exact moment I knew I was going to blow up my life.
It was about two months in. Snow was falling hard in a New Hampshire Nor’easter. I saw that the shed in the horse pen needed snow cleared off the roof. Something we would’ve done together.
Instead, it was just me. Alone. Miserable. The dogs. The horses. The storm.
I climbed the ladder, plunged into the heavy, wet snow and….nearly smacked myself in the face with the shovel. It. Was. Immovable.
So then—I did what every widow eventually does. I sat down and sobbed. On the roof. In the sleet. In the dark.
That was my wall. My moment of reckoning.
And in that moment, the cocoon tightened—and I knew I had to get out.
Going All In
That night, I decided:
No more fear. No more waiting for life to change.
I didn’t need to sit in that house, in our sacred shared space, just existing.
I didn’t need the magical “one year” mantra sold to me one more time.
I didn’t need to be some fragile egg, waiting for the mythical “better” to arrive.
What the hell is “better” anyway when your person is gone?
I left that life. I left it fast and completely:
Sold the house
Sold the vehicles
Quit the job
Traveled
Rebuilt
All within six months. And I never looked back.
Was it easy? No.
Was it perfect? No.
Did I “heal”? No.
But it was mine. On my terms. I wrestled control back in small and large doses.
A New Chapter, Written in Stars
I met someone. Random. Unexpected. A happy little accident. Almost three months to the day he died. How could I? Yet, I did.
It felt written in the stars—and still does, three years later.
We moved, settled in a brand new place. Slowly and carefully we supported each other through transition after transition. We made a life again, despite the fear. Despite the very real fact that one of us will die. Leaving the other to face all of this, all over again.
I tell him I’m dying first. Then I feel selfish.
The chain of events that led me to this new life is so improbable, you might not believe it. But it happened. Because I kept repeating my mantra:
Does it feel scary? Then do it.
Seek What Scares You
There’s a quote that became my guide during this time:
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late”. ~Beryl Markham
Markham was the first person to fly solo, non-stop across the Atlantic. Others had died trying. She trusted the cloud would clear once she was inside it.
She asks us to trust ourselves.
And to trust the larger universe, too.
So I did.
The Truth About the Past
It’s easy to idealize what we’ve lost. But if we’re honest, life before wasn’t perfect. It never is.
We were flawed. Our relationships were beautiful and broken in turns. We took risks. We missed chances. We made mistakes.
And yet—we moved forward.
You have permission to do that in your grief too.
The Heart of the Matter
Here’s the truth:
Every path forward after loss is terrifying.
For some, staying still provides comfort.
For others, staying still is the darker, heavier choice.
For some, change is unthinkable.
For others, it’s the only way toward something new.
The fear and uncertainty exist in every direction.
The choice is yours.
Only you can decide what fear means to you—
whether it’s a warning… or an invitation.
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