Fear of Flying

I have been flying almost since I was born. In fact my first flight was back from Seoul, South Korea when I was just little more than a year old. (I don't want to brag, but I had one of the cutest passport photo ever...) Throughout my life I have flown hundreds of times to places exotic - Palau, The Maldives, Tbilisi, and Yerevan, to name a few - and many more less so - Detroit, Baltimore, New Haven, etc. For all those flights, I was never scared or worried and in fact loved the whole act of flying. I was always excited and thrilled by being so high above the ground, and trusted in the technology conveying me almost entirely.

Recently, however, that has changed.

I think the change began when Karen and I flew to St. Martin in February 2008. I wouldn't say that I was particularly afraid while in the plane, but there was a level of relief unlike I experienced in the past when we returned to terra firma . At the time I passed it off as nothing more a fluke, the excitement of being on vacation with Karen rather than any real nervousness, and said nothing to her. But when the same, but more acute feeling came over me when we flew to Montreal for our honeymoon I told her. At first I was somewhat hesitant to mention it. Not because I thought Karen would think any less of me, but because we had so many travel plans in our minds and I didn't want her to feel like we should cancel them if I was uncomfortable. When I told her how I was suddenly getting nervous flying she gently hugged me and said simply that "it was because now we have something to live for." I will never forget that moment.

In the past months, my fear has grown. At first I found it was odd, since the things in my life that gave rise to my nervousness were no longer with me. Why hadn't my thinking about flying simply returned to my previous feeling, the one guided by my aeronautics understanding and former enjoyment of being in the air. It was until a recent weekend, while talking to a friend about it, that I realized from where my new fear, or at least concern, is derived.

If the events of November 16 has taught me anything, it is that almost anything, even the most remote, far-fetched, and unbelievably unimaginable things can happen. I'm not talking about things of such infinite possibilities, like nuclear missiles metamorphosing into sperm whales and bowls of petunias, but about those things of natural life that you just can't - or don't want to - imagine happening, happening.

For so much of my life I have taken for granted the efficacy and functionality of the "machine" known as the human body. Sure, I've experienced deaths and had even heard those tragic stories of people loosing loved ones prematurely and horrifically. But I'd always convinced myself that, just as I never expect to win the MegaMillions lottery, so too did I never imagine that I would ever have the most negative odds fall against me. The human body, as far as I was concerned, was a complex, mechanical and biological machine, that we expect to function as expected until during its normal time of existence. Despite all my prior experiences and knowledge of illness and bodily frailty, I continued to believe and live that way. That one's body could so suddenly and unexpectedly cease its function shocked me to my core.

That shock and new realization, I see now, transferred to airplanes. I now find myself sitting in my seat with an acute feeling that in a blink of an eye something unforeseen and unimaginable could happen; and there is nothing I or anyone else could do, just as there wasn't anything that could have been done for Karen when the paramedics arrived. The possibility of such a catastrophic system failure, for lack of a better description, is something that I used to only imagine could happen in fiction.

It also isn't only airplanes I envision failing, but other people as well. I find myself looking at individuals - whether on the subway, at a bar, on the street, etc. - with the horribly morbid thought of what could happen to them in an instant. It is a feeling that alternates between that and a feeling of complete injustice that nothing does happen to them but it did to Karen and me.

What it all comes back to is that, despite all my efforts to remember the 14 months we had together and focus as hard as I can on the happiness that was in Karen's eyes while we had that lunch together, the images of what happened replay uncontrollably through my mind more times each day than I can count. It is an unending loop of my fear, helplessness, and loneliness.

I am trying to pause the cycle of imagery. Not to forget it, as if that were even a possibility, but to create a space between the replays in which I can continue the process of constructing a new life from the shards of what once was. And I do find moments of happiness and laughter, but never far away are those memories. Much like now, when I sit in seat 16B of a Boeing 737 I can't seem to shake the fear of the improbable happening despite my rational understanding of the thousands of flights that take off, travel between destinations, and land without incident.

Will I eventually loose my new found fear of flying? I don't know, but it is yet another thing, like everything else from this past seven (almost eight) months, that I will have to learn to incorporate and process into my life as I move forward.