Irrational fear of Deja Vu

My dad who was previously in relatively good health was taken ill on Wednesday 30th June last year. He collapsed out in the garden down by the silver birch tree. He never regained conscious and died in hospital 8 days later.

My mum found him in the garden. She had been out for the morning at her ladies tap class, like she does every Wednesday.

I apologise if that sounds like a very matter of fact way of describing it, but it's the only way I have of verbalising the event that brought my world crashing down without ending up in tears over my iPad.

Since then, if I can't reach my mum on the phone, I start to worry. My mum had security cameras installed on the outside of the house a month ago, for her peace of mind so if she hears anything outside she will be able to check the cameras rather than venture outside herself.

The problem is, we can also check the cameras, and if I can see the cars on the drive and I can't reach my mum on the phone, I do get very concerned. The logical professor sitting on one shoulder calmly reminds me that my mum is in good health and she just may have gone down the road on foot, or she may be having a shower, or have the hoover/hairdryer on and not be able to hear the phone.

The little demon who perches on the opposite shoulder whispers in my ear that we thought my dad was in relatively good health and she may have slipped in the shower or fallen down the stairs, or, any number of things.

The point of it is this; fear of losing a loved one isn't logical, and it can't be alleviated by logic, no matter how hard you try. The little demon whispering in my ear (whose power to worry me has been magnified tenfold by the untimely tragic loss of my dad) comes up with five scenarios of what could have gone wrong for every logical explanation the professor provides for my mum not answering the phone.

As the phone rings and rings, the ice creeps into my stomach, and every time I relive that day that everything went so very wrong, when my mum phoned me at work to tell me Dad had been taken ill. When eventually I do get hold of her (like tonight for example, when she was in the shower) I feel stupid for worrying. "You shouldn't worry about something that might never happen", people say. Thing is, bad things do happen to good people, and nobody is invulnerable. My dad certainly wasn't.

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