I broke a piece of one of my wisdom teeth. Not something painful, it just scratches my cheek by its sharp edge. Seemingly something fairly simple. Irritating, but simple. Nothing that money and a dentist can’t fix in a short time. But it shook and depressed me to the core.
One of its reasons is the initial distrust I have in dentists, and the fact that I can no longer not go to one after that. Another reason is my fear of unknown authority figures, and because I don’t have a dentist in Haifa yet, I have to meet a new authority figure. All that can explain the fact that I cried after the tooth broke, but not the depression that came the next day and stayed for a whole day after.
I thought about it and found the reason for that depression - an unplanned and unmediated encounter with me own mortality. The tooth, in my mind, represents me. It suddenly, and with no rational reason disintegrated a little. I didn’t eat anything hard or got hit. It didn’t ache or caused any trouble. All I did was eating a soft cracker with cheese when I felt a hard and crumbling chunk in my mouth. I can’t glue this chunk back, it won’t mend like a broken bone.
The same way the falling of primary teeth represents the beginning of the transition from childhood to adolescence, for me the falling of the permanent teeth represents the beginning of the transition between adulthood and old age. I know I’m not old, I’m only 34 years old. I also know that there are plenty of people who don’t have healthy teeth at a much early age. It doesn’t matter. It’s a personal symbolism that has no connection to facts of logic. From the perspective of my subconscious I died a little.
I always have, and probably continue to have, nightmares about loose and falling teeth. Nightmares where I’m suddenly left with only a few teeth in my mouth. Nightmares where I try to put the teeth back in my gums, but they become huge and I can’t get then into my mouth. Dreams I always interpreted as the manifestation of my fear of losing control, which by itself is a manifestation of my fear of death.
All of a sudden this disintegration process began. One of the few processes of me physically getting older that didn’t start, until now. I’m familiar with body and emotional fatigue from an early age. I already have small wrinkles here and there. I have a few white hairs since I was a teenager, and my memory is all over the place with my fibromyalgia and ADD. I managed to keep my teeth whole and healthy, until now. I have a reason unrelated to the progression of time for all of that. Except for the disintegration of my tooth. I don’t have cavities or gingivitis, I didn’t get hit or bit on something hard. It is clearly physical deterioration related to the progression of time, and this is terrifying.
It is terrifying, but when I look at myself from the outside it is also fascinating. I have some kind of a weird relationship with death. I read a lot about it, and think about it a lot, and I try to put my fear of it in frames I can hold and handle. But despite all the work I’m doing, and will keep on doing, something so small and insignificant to a lot of people got me to my knees. It is more than fear. It is my body beginning to understand it will end someday, and neither it nor I have any control over this. No matter how much I’ll prepare myself and practice “looking death in the eyes”, as a human, I don’t want to die. As a living organism, the proof of its deterioration and demise is a bad thing, a depressing thing, something that even without consciousness disrupts the normal functioning of the mind.
I wonder if there is a way to accustom the body and the subconscious to accept this process as something that is not positive, but also not paralyzing. Like the way I try to accustom my logic that the fact that I know I would die should not paralyze me, but give me meaning. It’s a question I’ll try to answer over the time, mainly because I don’t think I have a choice in that matter.