Separating from Anxiety

                Sometimes, it can be very difficult to cope with being separated with someone or something that is very dear to us.  This painful separation can come in many forms such as a breakup, death, or other circumstance that prevents us from being with the one thing that makes us feel normal.  However, what happens when this feeling of separation becomes more than a painful adjustment that does not heal over time? Unfortunately, there are some who suffer from this feeling to a point it causes severe anxiety and they have difficulty coping and functioning normally ln a day to day basis.  Many times, in adults, this can be the hardest after they have experienced the death of someone they love dearly.  According to research, this state of mental un-wellness can cause one to feel more “anxious, as opposed to secure or dismissively avoidant and this attachment style was associated with chronic grief after a loss” (Dell'Osso, L., Carmassi, C., Corsi, M., Pergentini, I., Socci, C., Maremmani, A. G., & Perugi, G., 2011).  This helps to describe the adverse impact that his feeling can cause and how difficult it can be for someone to overcome the intense feeling of loss by forced separation.

                In Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Paper Pills”, we can further see a literary example of how separation anxiety can cause a person to learn to deal with this deep, painful feeling of lose.  In it, Anderson tells the story of Doctor Reefy, an old man who had experienced the death of his wife.  Throughout the story it tells the story of how Doctor Reefy and his wife had begun their romance; it also highlights that even in the beginning of their courtship he “already begun the practice of filling his pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown away” (Anderson, S.,p. 8 ).  These scraps of paper were thoughts he had that he had written down for safe keeping in his pockets.  The reason that this is important because at the end of Anderson’s story, after he had described how Doctor Reefy’s wife had died, he once again highlights how the Doctor “read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper. After he had read them he laughed and stuffed them away in his pockets to become round hard balls” (Anderson, S., p. 8). in the winter before the spring in which she died.  This is significant because Anderson ends the story here and we do find out what becomes of these hard paper pills.  However, his emphasis on these literary artifacts suggests that the Doctor will come back to these relics during his grieving and healing to remember his wife and deal with the pain of being separated from her.  Furthermore, this shows how people learn to cope and deal with this loss in different ways but, it is important to focus on positive aspects of what was lost, instead of subjecting yourself to a more self-destructive option.

Dell'Osso, L., Carmassi, C., Corsi, M., Pergentini, I., Socci, C., Maremmani, A. G., & Perugi, G. (2011). Adult separation anxiety in patients with complicated grief versus healthy control subjects: relationships with lifetime depressive and hypomanic symptoms. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234173/

ANDERSON, S. (2016). WINESBURG, OHIO. S.l.: VALUE CLASSIC REPRINTS.