When I was a child, I wasn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, now and then I’d hide in a closet and
find a nook that was dark and quiet, trying to find a little bit of peace and
quiet for myself. This is not to say
that I didn’t believe that things lurked out in the darkness, that the world
around us wasn’t populated by a thousand invisible enemies who were waiting for
us. I did. I simply wasn’t afraid of them.
My earliest dreams could be called nightmares, except that
they weren’t frightening per se. There was the one where the skeletons danced
and played instruments around my bed and made it levitate only to fly out onto
the street ( after going right through the wall); there was the one where my
sister and I were in the middle of a volcano with our grandma, trying to find
our way back up the top; there was the one where I was running for miles down a
spiral staircase with someone, while something chased us (we were separated
after he flung me out the window to escape).
Still, in each and every single
one of this dreams the emotion that dominated me wasn’t fear, but rather an all
consuming need to take what control I had of the situation and escape. The survival instinct was all that I could
focus on, so there was no time for the fear.
Friends and family remarked a few times how taken aback they
were by the way I handled my cancer battle. And yet, I don’t know that I found my reaction out of the ordinary.
It was, it is, a battle. I have been training for battle since I have memory of
self- awareness; most of these dreams took place before I was six, although
some ( the tower one in particular) continued well into my teens.
My grandma Anita use to sing us stories. I say stories
because they weren’t simply songs, but rather a continuation of the story that
connected us to her, to the generations past.
Most were tragic, many strangely haunting. One was about El Coco ( El
Cucuy) which I didn’t come across until recently (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_%28folklore%29):
Duérmete
mi niño, duérmete ya...
Si
no viene el Coco y te comerá.
Y
si no te come, Te llevara…
Y
si no te lleva, quien sabe que hara…
(“Go to sleep, child/
go to sleep now/ for if you don’t the Coco will come and eat you/ and if it
doesn’t eat you, it will take you away/ and if it doesn’t take you, who knows
what it’ll do…”)
Until yesterday I was fully convinced that she had made it
up.
I wouldn’t put it past her; with her dark humour and wit, it
was just the thing she’d do. However, it appears that the song is far older
than her… ancestral even. It’s a warning about one of the many things that live
out in the dark, the many things that can attack us if we stray from the path.
I’m reminded of Little Red Riding Hood and the warnings to not stray from that
path… what lay in the wilderness around it? What could we do if we did stray
and things spun out of our control, in that savage land outside the prescribed,
safe routes?
Like I said - I wasn’t afraid of the dark, and I
wasn't afraid of straying from the prescribed road to make my own path.
It wasn’t that I
didn’t believe in monsters - oh, I did!- but I believed in my own
capacity to
outwit them and survive. I believed that no matter what these spawns of a
chaotic universe attacked me with I
would find a way to still make it out alive.
So my life, much like my cancer battle, hasn’t been guided by fear but
by faith… largely in me and my ability to find
a way out when things spin out of control.
When my son was born, fear snuck in. Not about me, but at my ability to protect him.
I had honed my skills over the years to know that I woulsd find a way to always be okay… but it
wasn’t about me anymore. So I told him
there were no monsters, and put night lights in his room. I told him that
the shadows were the hangers in the
closet, the baubles in his room. I told him there was nothing beyond this world
he saw, so there was nothing to fear. I
told myself that if he couldn’t picture the monsters in the darkness then
perhaps they couldn’t see HIM.
Then the cancer came. Then came the day my son asked me about G-d. How did I know, how
could I know? If there is nothing in the darkness, how could there be something
in the light? I realized that in hiding the monsters I had hidden the fae, the
spirits, our G-d. Because at the end its all about faith, that faith that walks
you through the valleys of fear, that lifts you into safely and healing.
So now I don’t tell him there’s no shadows in the wall. I
don’t tell him that there are no bugbears in the world, that he walks cloaked
in the safety and bliss of ignorance of what may lay beyond. I don’t tell him
there’s no Coco, but teach him how to build up his strength and hone his battle skills… so
if the bastard ever comes for him he knows just how to take him down.
