"Mom, will you tell me a story before I go to bed?" asked E-Niner.

"Sure, sweetie."

"Tell me about when you were a little girl."

Since E-Niner is five, I started telling him about my most memorable moment as a five-year old: the day I brought my dad's bright red tonette to show and tell. But I didn't get very far.

"Mom," he likes to start his bedtime questions with my name, "where was I when you did that?"

"You weren't alive yet."

"Was I dead?"

"Well, no--"

"Am I going to die one day?" he asks, this time with more tension in his voice.

"Yes, but it won't be for a long--"

"I don't want to be dead. Where will I go?"

"When it's time for you to go, you'll be ready. And you'll go to heaven." I said.

Did I believe it? Or was I just saying this to comfort him?

I'm a grown-up. I can handle not knowing exactly what happens when we die. Or, let's put it this way, I've figured out a way to supress my thinking that right now I'm okay with not knowing exactly what happens when we die. Closer to that moment, I may be quite anxious myself.

I've got my own anxiety issues. I struggle with panic attacks. I can go for years and years without one, and then there are years that are filled with them. It's common for anxious people to be afraid of death and dying. It's probably common for non-anxious people to have some issues with that process, too.

But how do explain death to a child whose highly volitle mind takes him to anxious places? It's almost like I want to have the answers for him not for my own peace of mind, but for his.

As E-Niner continued to think about death, he became more and more agitated. He noticed that his breathing was "going faster." He's such a good kid to take note of his body. Granted, he's been learning to "read" his body in therapy since he was two, but only in recent months have I seen him take initiative even before I notice.

"What should you do when you feel your breathing going faster?" I asked.

"I need to blow it out. I need to blow out all my scary thoughts." He exhaled several staccato breaths.

"That's it," I said. "Try to take some longer breaths in...and out."

He slowed down.

"Blow out all those scary thoughts," I said.

"Did you see all those skeletons come out, Mom?" he asked.

Crap.

My son has had issues with reality. It's part of anxiety -- not just his anxiety, but for anyone with anxiety. Anxious minds tend to take off like freight cars loosened from their engines and firing off the tracks. Anxious minds "derail" and perhaps start making illogical conclusions from a set of circumstances.

The difference between most people with anxiety and my son is that their anxiety doesn't take them to places where they begin seeing and hearing things that don't exist. It's this type of thinking that marks E-Niner's anxiety as "severe."

For my part, as I have been trained, I told him that I didn't see skeletons come out of his breath and that there were no skeletons coming out of his breath. Thankfully, he agreed with me. "I think it was just in my mind," he said.

"Yes, it's all in your mind."

Crisis averted.

But here's the rub: I consider myself to be a relatively anxious person, and one of my primary parental duties is to help my severely anxious child quell his own anxiety.

There are times when I see that E-Niner has completely lost it. He's so scared he's unable to move; he quivers; he tells people to get away from him; he runs; he can't accept any form of consolation because he's just too damned scared. Those are the times that baffle me the most because I've been there. And I don't know how to stop it from happening to me when it does. It's those times that I see him -- and see myself in him -- that I feel at such a loss.

A few years back when we started getting mental health diagnoses for E-Niner, we were told that to diagnose a child so young was very rare. Two-year olds usually don't get ADHD and anxiety diagnosed in writing to insurance companies. I now understand that these particular mental health issues that E-Niner has are so severe and so obvious that even at that tender of an age, they were apparent.

There was this notion I had back when E-Niner was two that we would address the issues with a ton of therapy and that by the time he was five and ready for school, he'd have had them licked.

I think I need to stretch out that trajectory a bit farther -- maybe to the day that he has kids and tells them bedtime stories.