TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY

This piece examines death anxiety through embodied knowledge of grief. It treats grief not only as an emotion but as something etched into breath, muscle, pulse, and autonomic rhythm, what some call “the body keeping score”

After my grandfather’s sudden passing in 2020, I navigated a few existential months of frequent, unpredictable panic attacks, and at this point in my life, without the language to internally decipher or externally describe what was happening in my body. Luckily, they always seemed to pass.

As this piece unfolds, it similarly climaxes in sudden, explosive waves of orchestral density, dynamic intensity, and timbral abrasion before dissolving into fragile stillness. In this work, I yearn to create a testament to the beauty of the living, experiencing body. How profound and wondrous that it can endure such terror only briefly before it must, even under great stress, find rest.

—Coral Douglas