of stress as my career built was also a factor, and already having performance anxiety. And the trigger of excessive anxiety when Gabe died. Responding to the panic attacks with fear and avoidance just made it worse. Avoidance was a big problem for me. I started lying to myself. Or maybe I’d done that all along. And I lied to other people, too. People I cared about.” I squeezed Taylor’s hand, hoping she knew that I was trying to apologize for the time she asked me about my agoraphobia, and I told her that I wasn’t agoraphobic. “It was one of the ways I tried to cope.”
“It’s understandable,” Courteney said. “You were afraid of being judged. You were judged when Gabe died.”
“Yeah.”
“What kinds of things were you afraid of besides leaving the house?”
“Crowds. Enclosed spaces, when they’re crowded. I got overwhelmed so easily. Just the thought of walking into a concert venue again made me feel sick. Sometimes, when I was about to go onstage and a panic attack hit, I was sure something terrible was going to happen. There was no other way I could justify how bad I felt. I thought I was going to die. And then when Gabe died… Every time I started to panic, I was overwhelmed with this fear that something would happen to someone I loved. Because that did happen.”
“I’m sorry, Cary,” my sister said. “I don’t think even I understood how bad it was for you. I tried.”
“I know you did. But maybe another person would’ve coped with everything better than I did. I couldn’t really cope, because I hadn’t dealt with the anxiety. There were times when I even wondered if I let the anxiety go unchecked so it would take over, and I wouldn’t have to face what happened to Gabe. Maybe I wanted to drown in it.”
Courteney said nothing. I could see the tears in her eyes now. I was barely hanging on myself.
But I was determined not to cry today. I just wanted to get the words out.
It was an unburdening, maybe. I was trying to release the anchor. And maybe I hoped that after this conversation, I could finally stop drowning.
“The thing with an anxiety disorder like this,” I said, “is that the fear is way out of proportion to the actual danger in the situation, which often doesn’t even exist. But the physical cues in your body, the terror you feel, is so real to you in the moment, it overrides rationality. To cope, you either avoid those situations where you think you might be triggered, or you need someone to go with you, someone you can trust, to lean on, like I did with Gabe. And your world gets smaller and smaller the more you avoid. The thing about treatment is that you pretty much have to face your fears. And that’s been hard for me to do.”
“Because it’s so tied to Gabe?”
“Yeah. That whole situation.” I took a breath, because I knew we were getting close. Would I really be able to talk about it? “It’s hard for me to revisit it,” I admitted, though I knew both Courteney and Taylor knew that by now. “Therapy and healing, for me, has been kind of an on-and-off thing. One step forward, two steps back. An uphill battle, I guess.”
“But you eventually kept working,” my sister said. “Professionally, you did well for yourself. You started producing other bands.”
“Yeah. Eventually. I started working in my home studio, just tinkering around, and then it grew from there. I think that saved me. Music saved me.”
“And the rest is history,” Courteney said with a small smile, “paved in platinum albums.”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Do you want to talk about his death at all?” she asked me gently. “How it happened? You don’t have to.”
“I don’t know, Courteney.”
“When I interviewed Gabe’s parents,” she said, “they wanted to talk about it. They told me afterward that they were glad they did. That it was helpful. A lot of people lost him that day, Cary. And when you put your experience into words, it can help.”
Damn. She was wise for a little sister.
“What do you want to know?” I asked her. It was just her. I focused on her, and Taylor. They were the only ones listening to this right now.
“What happened that day, from your point of view?” Courteney asked me.