Fear

She was always afraid of heights.

And she could not understand why.

Every time she rode on a bridge, she shut her eyes tight and gripped onto anything she could lay her hands on for support.

When she was to fly in an aeroplane, she had to take sleeping pills, if not, she will scream until fainted as the plane took off and when she awoke up in the air, she will fall into catatonia until hours after it had landed.

She feared ladders.

Refused to ride elevators.

Or look down wells.

And would only live on the ground floor of buildings or hotels.

One day I asked her about her irrational fear.

And she said.

"I always see myself failing down this great height, and nothing can break my fall. I see myself screaming in this cold fear as I plummet and suddenly it just disappears."

This was nearly fifteen years ago.

Last month she visited Nigeria for the first time.

And journeyed with her adopted parents to her hometown in Adamawa.

From where she was taken at the age of three by them from the missionary orphanage where she was.

It was there she heard the story.

Of her grandfather.

Who had lived the last half of his life badly crippled.

In paraplegia.

After a fall from one of the mountains that hug the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.

This was before his marriage to his grandmother, who had loved him in spite of his handicap and sired four children with him.

Her grandfather never climbed a mountain again.

Her father also never did.

He had the same irrational fear of heights, even though he had died alongside her mother in a boat mishap.

Leaving her, their only child, orphaned.

And when she came back to Canada and told her psychologist what she had found out about her progeny.

She sat astounded as her psychologist explained to her the phenomena known as genetic memory.

And how we can inherit the fears and phobias of our ancestors.

A fear or phobia imprinted or etched in their DNA after they experienced something intensely traumatic.

"Our genes do not only guide our height, size, looks, intellect, sexuality and attitude, they also contain what we like, what we hate, what we fear, and what everything our forebears experienced."

She had begun therapy to undo the fear she inherited and maybe save her own children from suffering what she suffers.

May we deal with those traumas we experience by seeing people trained to help people who suffer them, so that when we procreate, the DNA of our children, which we contribute to, is saved from carrying over to the next generation the pain, the scars and the fears that plague us.

Toronto

Jude Idada
September 2018