Writing

I just finished an article about a doctor who had panic attacks and wrote a book about it. He said that the writing ended up being a great tool in dealing with the panic. He also said that learning to deal with the panic attacks led to a thirty year battle with constant anxiety. This sounds familiar, doesn't it. I wonder if my battle has led to anxiety, ocd and depression. It still kind of amazes me  that I can have panic attacks every once in a while. Maybe, could it be, that I have not learned to live with them as well as I thought I had. Or to put it another way, the depression and ocd and anxiety is the way I learned to live with them. It wouldn't be the first time I defined a part of my belief and spirituality and ended up coming up with the wrong answers!
Could it help to look and write about things in my life? Not just the stupid poems that are meaningful only to me, but just a journal of my life events and my feelings at the time. Anyway, it got me thinking, and I thought about all my poems that seem to speak to me that I have written, all pertain to death. I will try to write the memories of experiences I have had with the grim reaper here in this post and add to them as they come to me. Which all led to this, actually got me started writing, that the three strongest men I have known, a lot of fear was involved in their death. The fear I felt from my mother's reaction when my Papa died, and the detached fear I saw in my father and father-in-law when they were dying. The first was a panic type fear that the world was not as I thought it was and was changing. And the second was the anxiety, the detached fear, as it was reaffirmed to me that nobody, not even the strongest and the best, know. Somehow, I was with both men when they died and both handled their death with the kind of courage, integrity and poise that I can only hope to come close too. But the fear I recognized. I had seen so little of it from these two men, but now it was visible, at least to me. And my fear is visible to me, but I look to their examples of strength in the face of fear and try to copy it. Ah, but as I have said before in many ways, I am not that strong.