Fighting Ghosts

Confronting My Deepest Fear and What It Taught Me About Love

That night at Levon Helm Studios felt like a dream. I was standing front-row in the balcony, the wooden rails worn smooth by countless hands and elbows before mine. Below me, the stage was washed in green lights. J.S. Ondara, stood just feet away with his signature fedora, shades, powder blue suit, and acoustic guitar, his voice filling every inch of the converted barn that had become a pilgrimage for musicians and fans. The evening so far had been perfection—the venue, the music, my view—it felt almost too good to be real.

Just as the second set began, I first felt it. A strange sensation in my abdomen—something that made me pause mid-song and think, this is kind of weird.

I should have been absorbed in the lyrics and music. Instead, my nervous system still on edge from a challenging psychedelic ceremony just twenty four hours earlier, I found myself zeroing in on this odd feeling deep in the bowels of my gut.

I tried to ignore the sensation and enjoy the rest of this intimate performance. I told myself it would be gone by morning.

It wasn't.

When I woke up, my attention went straight to that spot like a tongue trying to soothe a sore tooth. Without hesitation, there it was, and even stronger than the night before. I could feel the twisting and pulsing, as if a buried object was waking up inside of me.

And that's when the stories started. Maybe it's from those intense bodyweight workouts I've been doing. Maybe I pulled something. Maybe it's just stress. Or the residue from the ceremony a few nights ago. I was grasping for any explanation that would let me go about my life without panic.

But a week later, as we headed up to Lake Placid for July 4th weekend, the pain had settled in like relatives who overstay their welcome. The reasonable explanations—pulled muscles, workout strain, ceremony aftereffects—fell apart when the pain stuck around. My mind began crafting darker narratives. What if it's something serious? What if it's cancer?

—

By the end of July, my entire existence had collapsed into this puzzling sensation in my body. I'd wake up at 3 AM, shuffle to the bathroom, and before I was even fully conscious, there it was—the pain and fear waiting for me in the darkness. I'd come back to my room, look at my wife sleeping and think, What happens to her if I leave? The next morning, I'd watch my daughters playing and feel this crushing weight: How do I tell them dada might be dying?

Every few minutes throughout the day, my hand would drift to my abdomen and ribcage, pressing, probing, massaging, checking if it had changed or if I could feel something just under the skin. I'd find myself on WebMD at random hours, typing symptoms into the search bar and watching the screen populate with terrifying possibilities. My creative energy vanished completely. I couldn't focus on work, couldn't be present in conversations, couldn't think about anything else. This thing followed me everywhere like the Grim Reaper, a constant shadow that turned every day into a confrontation with my fragility and mortality.

Several months into this battle, I scheduled appointments with multiple doctors and practitioners. My primary care physician. Two gastroenterologists. A colonoscopy. A full blood panel. A full body scan. Dozens of hours and countless dollars trying to get to the bottom of this pain.

The colonoscopy results came back completely normal. When I asked my gastroenterologist if I should get an endoscopy, he was kind but direct. "Sure, if you think it will help you, but I sense this is something that's going on up here," he said, tapping his temple, "not in your body." He shared something frank and wise, that thoughts about pain can trigger the pain itself, and it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. That perhaps it was psychosomatic.

I could sense the truth of his statement because it tracked with my experience, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. This pain was real. It stung to think it might be “all in my head,” but I trusted him enough to sit with the possibility.

You would think that each appointment and normal result would have been relieving, but I only felt farther away from a conclusion—whatever was wrong was somehow dodging the tests. The pain and stories continued.

I tried everything I thought could help relieve my suffering. Reworked my diet with the help of a nutritionist. Sessions with a master bodyworker who specialized in abdominal work. Meditations where I'd sit and try to just observe the pain, hoping it would dissolve. Yoga nidra recordings that I'd listen to while trying to relax and breathe into my body, while part of me was mentally cataloging the lingering symptoms. Affirmations about healing that felt hollow in my mouth. Hypnosis apps promising to melt the pain and heal my energy system.

I was deep into a spiritual and existential emergency—a dark night of the soul—that clearly wasn’t going away. I threw just about every tool and method at this thing. None of it touched what was really happening, until one night in November, more than five months into living with this obscure pain.

—

The kids were finally asleep upstairs. I was sprawled on our couch, the familiar ache pulsing in my gut, complaining to my wife for what felt like the hundredth time that week. "I don't understand why nothing is working," I said, pressing my hand against my ribcage again. "The doctors say I'm fine, the meditation isn't helping, the bodywork isn't helping. This thing is still here every single day."

She looked at me with that no-nonsense look I’m so familiar with. I knew she was done with my shit.

"You just need to find a therapist who can help you process what's going on."

Something inside me knew she was right. As much as she loves me, she couldn't help, and I could tell she was tired of listening to my endless complaining. I needed a therapist, someone who could just listen to me. For months, I'd been trying to heal myself, fix myself, figure this out on my own.

After months of suffering and complaining, I finally did something I should have done over the summer when this all began. I grabbed my phone, went on Psychology Today, and found a local therapist who specialized in psychosomatic pain, specifically anxiety disorders related to fear of illness and death. I emailed him immediately.

Two days later, sitting in his office for the first time, I felt like I was admitting defeat. All my doctor appointments, spiritual practices, all my inner work, all my supposed wisdom about presence and acceptance, and here I was, needing another human being to help me see what was right in front of me.

I hadn't been to therapy since I got sober eight years prior. I thought I was beyond needing therapy, that I had healed my past wounds. But I was broken, desperate and finally accepting my limitations.

We had two sessions the first week and began to meet weekly. An old pattern began to surface that I could see with perfect clarity—my fear of terminal illness and death had followed me in different manifestations since I was in college. The jaw discomfort I was convinced was mouth cancer from chewing tobacco. The chest pain I thought was a heart attack. The persistent esophageal burning I thought was cancer when I was smoking weed every day. I could trace the line back nearly twenty years.

For six months, I'd been carrying this terror in isolation. The fear had grown in secrecy, the catastrophic thoughts I couldn't share and the weight of holding such enormous dread alone. But in that first session, and especially over those first two weeks, something shifted. He wasn't trying to fix me or offer frameworks. He was just collecting information, listening to my history, really unpacking when this all started.

And slowly, I began to name it. The thing I'd been too afraid to say out loud to anyone: I was terrified of death, my death. Terrified of annihilation, of illness and sickness and suffering and pain and misery. I'd been holding all of this in my body because I couldn't bear to name it to anybody.

Through our conversations, I began to understand something that all my medical and spiritual interventions had missed: I needed to actually feel and experience the fear, not intellectualize or transcend it. I needed to grieve the reality of having a body that would someday fail. I needed to honor the impermanence I'd been running from. I had to own it all and be witnessed.

He just held that space. Didn't try to talk me out of it, didn't offer diagnoses or solutions, didn't make me feel crazy. Sometimes all we need is someone willing to hold space without judgment, to just listen to our suffering and fear and pain from a place of loving presence. In our society, we think we have to effort to help someone. But sometimes the most powerful thing is simply being willing to listen without trying to fix or figure anything out.

So I let myself cry about not wanting to leave my family, this life. I accepted it, fully.

And the knot in my abdomen began to release. Just five percent at first, but I could feel it. I no longer had to hold it alone in my body. I was sharing it.

Within two months, the physical pain was completely gone. I let the therapist know our work was finished, not because I'd learned some technique, but because I'd confronted my demons, confronted and felt this fear of death, and began to honor the impermanence of life.

I had a choice then. I could continue living as if my body was a ticking bomb, scanning for threats, or I could accept that discomfort is part of being human. That pain doesn't always mean danger. That I can honor what my body tells me without letting it dictate my entire existence.

I know I’m not alone in this. This fear of death, of losing everything we love, is as human as it gets. I've had friends and clients come to me with their own versions of this story. We torture ourselves trying to prolong life and control the uncontrollable, and in doing so, we miss so much of the life we're desperate to protect.

—

As I confronted this fear, I began to share my existential crisis outside of my therapist's office. I was in my men's group when Ian looked at me and said in his eloquent British accent, "I know why you're so scared of death, Steve. You just love life so much, you don’t want to lose it.”

Ian was right—I absolutely love life and everything about it. My family, my friends, my home, my work, this imperfect body that carries me around every day. Morning coffee and watching my girls play together in the backyard. The way light cuts through the trees at sunrise. Leaves drifting to the ground in fall. Crickets chirping at night when I take the trash out. Classical music filling the car on a random Tuesday when I drive to the office. The look my wife gives me when our three-year-old says something that cracks us both up. I even love the challenging moments—the arguments, the sleepless nights, the worry, the pain. All of it.

The fear I realized comes from love. The deeper you love life, the more terrifying it is to lose it. But living in constant fear of losing what you love means you're not really living it at all. You're just holding on so tight you can't feel what's actually in your hands. Impermanence isn't the Grim Reaper, it's what makes everything precious.

Now when I feel something strange in my body, I pause. I notice. If it persists or concerns me, I get it checked out. But I don't let it steal months of my life. I've learned the difference between honoring my body's signals and being held hostage by my mind's stories.

Two and a half years later, I can sit with discomfort without writing horror stories about it. I've learned to get help when I need it instead of trying to fix everything myself, and I'm getting better at honoring what I'm actually experiencing, even when I'm afraid to admit it. That's progress.

—

Earlier this week, I was walking down our street as our six-year-old rode her bike alongside me. She looked to the side of the road and asked why the ferns were now brown and wilting. I told her it was because the seasons are changing. It's fall now, and they're dying. She glanced back at me with wide eyes. "Everything dies?"

“Yes, everything—plants, animals, and even me—but hopefully not for a long time,” I said, “and fall reminds us of that.” I explained, “But those ferns and all the plants around us will return next spring. This is the rhythm of life—birth and death. It’s what makes life so beautiful and so special.

She looked at me for a moment, then raced off on her bike to catch up with our neighbor's dog.