Who Are We Without Our Fears?

On grief, claustrophobia, and the unbearable weight of our living

Maybe that’s why we often feel so compelled to take pictures of ourselves in lifts: it has less to do with light than with the joy of feeling light, safe too, like in a sort of womb.

When I told my mom a year and a half ago that I had moved to the 16th floor of a 24-storey building, also as a sort of exposure therapy for my fear of lifts, she joked that she’d never be able to visit, her claustrophobia being so real she couldn’t even lock herself in public toilets, let alone step into an elevator. She died a few months later from cancer and never got to come to London one last time to see the place.

Once, during one of my visits to Italy, where she lived with the rest of my family, I took her to the hospital for a CAT scan. “I’m calm, you’re here with me”, she keeps saying while she’s driving, her already gnarled hands from years of working as a cleaner made even rougher by the chemio, so much that the wheel seems made out of velvet next to them. I know she says it as a mantra, a shield against the monsters of doubt, but I just nod and smile back. It’s only when we learn that the hospital’s escalators are out of service and we’ll have to take the lift to get to the room that she starts to panic.

There she is, a 50-something-year-old woman stomping her feet in protest like a child, the curve of her lips melting into a line of uncontrollable desperation, and she’s terrified, although if it’s of what the CAT scan will…