What We Lose(3)

Fear of flying is most often an indirect combination of one or more other phobias related to air travel, such as claustrophobia (a fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (a fear of heights), or agoraphobia (especially the type that has to do with having a panic attack in a place you can’t escape from). Flight anxiety can also be linked to one’s feelings about the destination. It is a symptom rather than a disease, and different causes may spur anxiety in different individuals.

There are many Web sites offering courses or information that treat flight anxiety, many written by pilots or ex–air transportation professionals. One of the sites, promising a meditation-based approach to aerophobia, lists an example of destination-associated flight anxiety.

A woman in Maryland is in a long-distance relationship with a man in California. The relationship has recently turned bad, and the woman decides that on the next planned visit she is going to break up with the man. She has preexisting flight anxiety, but the anticipation of the breakup compounds her symptoms. She is unable to sleep for weeks before the trip, and dreams of the plane she is on falling out of the sky and crashing into the Rocky Mountains. Her anxiety is so severe that she almost decides she isn’t well enough to make the flight, but on further consideration, she decides that the relationship needs to end. Breaking up wouldn’t be right over the phone. So she takes the flight and is nervous the whole time, even though she takes a Xanax just before liftoff, as prescribed by her psychiatrist. She breaks up with the man, which turns out to be difficult but necessary, and notices that her anxiety is much less severe on the returning plane ride.





We were on our way to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where we had just switched planes for the two-hour flight. It was twilight. A rainstorm had been going for the past few hours and thunder was just beginning to rumble far off in the distance. We left the earth moments ago; the plane finished its ascent and was beginning to level off. We were starting to relax in our seats, ready for the flight attendants to return to the aisles with their drink carts. All of a sudden, the plane jumped into the air, as if an invisible hand had pushed us higher. We rocketed upward, our bodies whipped against our seat belts. People screamed. Two people fell into the aisle. One lay there groaning; the other, a young woman of about twenty, screamed, “Mama, Mama!”

Outside the windows, bright light flashed, and inside, the cabin was whitewashed for an instant.

My parents, sitting on either side of me, each grabbed one of my arms. I heard my mother start to pray.

Then the plane righted itself. The passengers around me slowly relaxed, first shakily fixing their hair, tightening their belts, murmuring. Then their voices returned to normal and, smiling at each other, they began pressing the buttons for the flight attendants. “Close call,” I heard someone near me say with a sigh.

The pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell us we had been hit by lightning. Despite our fright, no damage had been done to the plane. The rest of the passengers, including my parents, all seemed to forget the incident after this, but I was frozen in my seat, terrified. My mother noticed and called for an attendant to bring me a glass of red wine. The alcohol soothed the circling thoughts of danger and fear, and soon I fell asleep, though something of this moment never left me.



Most of my family lives in or around Sandton, known as the richest square kilometer in Africa. It is a suburb of Johannesburg, home to luxury malls and complexes of mansions so heavily guarded you can’t even see their street signs unless you’re granted access. Sandton lies a forty-minute drive from some of the poorest townships in the country, where many of the gardeners, housekeepers, and security guards who tend these opulent homes and businesses live. This situation—the close proximity and daily interaction of the ever-stratifying classes—has led to the country’s new postapartheid violence.

I have two aunts who live within the neighborhood limits, and an investment banker cousin who will move into one of the million-rand apartments in the grand Michelangelo Towers as soon as they are built. Our vacation home sits just minutes away from Sandton’s busy commercial drag, in a quieter neighborhood that is on a level of wealth nearly indistinguishable for anyone not from the area.

Oscar Pistorius was born and raised here, and attended a primary school just down the hill from my family’s vacation home. When I heard the details of the killing of his blonde model girlfriend, I found his explanation of the crime plausible. American news outlets made headlines out of his fascination with guns. He joked about arming himself when surprised by the sound of the washing machine. This does not shock me or strike me as out of the ordinary. All of my male family members own guns. My most hotheaded cousin sleeps with a loaded pistol under his pillow. (Miraculously, no fate similar to Oscar’s has befallen him.) I can understand the sense of fear—waking in the night, seeing your bedroom window open, the evening air breezing through the curtains. I can understand reacting with the most force, because in South Africa, the worst outcome often happens. Rarely are you overestimating your own safety. It seems fully possible that he responded reflexively, especially given that he has no legs, and must have felt an ingrained vulnerability for years because of that fact.

But that same vulnerability might have produced an ego in Oscar that would propel him to dominate beautiful women, that would drive him to control a woman as desired and independent—as capable of leaving and being with another man—as Reeva Steenkamp. I chose to believe this story, of the athlete ruined by fame, instead of believing my worst thoughts and fears about my other home country.