Worst Fears Read Online Free PDF

spring was there again, between her shoulder-blades.
    Alexandra heard a kind of keening noise outside. The bed no longer tempted her. She went to the window and looked out over the garden, the hedge, the field beyond, the duck pond. Early morning light made everything glittery, almost too bright to see clearly. Downstairs Diamond began to bark. She could see a figure lurking just beyond the hedge: someone was skulking, and wailing. She saw, as so often in the last few days, but did not absorb. The real world ran like a TV film you watched or didn’t watch, fitfully, according to mood.
    Alexandra thought bereavement was like bonding: you grieved for the dead as you bonded with a newborn baby. There wasn’t much you could do about either. The response was bred into you; it was genetically determined, physiological, beyond your control. If a spouse died, or a parent, a child, a sibling, or to a lesser extent when a friend or colleague died, or to a greater extent again a king, a president, a pop-star or a religious leader, why then you grieved. You couldn’t help it. You hurt. You stopped, just as if you had a physical pain or a fever, to wait for healing. Tears flowed. You could not even see sufficiently to act. Grief was nature’s way, no doubt, of preserving the group against unnecessary death. That person did that. That person died. Don’t you do it. Don’t let that happen again in a hurry! Grief for the old is tempered, mild; grief for the young is acute, survival-friendly for the tribe. As is grief’s companion emotion, the desire for vengeance. Hang the killers! Bomb the bombers! Sue the doctors! No further justification needed, swoop over the hill to loot, plunder, rape; steal the Sabine women, replenish the tribe. Vengeance sucks up grief, buries it. Nature’s satisfied. The Gods demand human sacrifice, always did; the hideous divine maw sucks in the living, chomps down on warm flesh, kills, devours. Then healing Nature gapes open its mouth and new life pours out of it, raw and writhing, an endless, ever-multiplying stream. One day it will choke on the sheer volume of its production: it has to.
    More wailing from outside. A peculiar keening; an ethnic chant. Alexandra took no notice.
    You had to separate out the mourning from the death. Grief was not particular to Ned. Had she married another man, and had a child by him, and he had died last Saturday night, she would be in just this same state now. Others would say, in an attempt to explain the irrationality of the emotion, “Oh, you grieve for your own death. Another’s death reminds you of your own mortality. The closer that life was, the worse it is for you.” But it wasn’t necessarily so. Fear of death was reasonable: terror of the unknown, of the grim forest of non-being: but grief for oneself? No. Grief in advance for the others who in their turn will mourn you—should there be any—would be more appropriate. It was a terrible thing for anyone to be plunged without warning or their consent into mourning, but what could you lament for the dead themselves? Death came to everyone. If it came suddenly so much the better. Lucky Ned. Poor Alexandra.
    Or people would say, “Poor Ned. He won’t be there to watch his child grow up.” But that didn’t wash either. Children grow up to grow away. The younger the child, the purer, the more exquisite the parental feeling. Not to be there to see your child grow up would be the blessing, not the curse. It was pointless to search for reasons: grief accompanies bereavement—it is nature’s stick—as joy accompanies birth—it is nature’s carrot.
    Grief was luxurious, in the way porridge on a cold morning is luxurious, or a cold shower on a hot day, or water when you are thirsty, or a languid kiss between lovers: anything which holds you at that pleasurable point where the satisfaction of the senses and the need for survival meet. She would go with it, not fight it. It would cure itself, as a broken leg heals