Fear The Walking Dead season 7 Survival Rule: Reasons To Survive

Fear the Walking Dead; Grace loses her will to live

If there was one thing you couldn’t miss in this week’s episode of Fear TWD, it was that Grace was not happy that she was alive to see the nuclear wasteland. We saw her literally screaming that she didn’t want to be there anymore.

For a bit of a refresher, once she realized that neither she nor Morgan could do anything to abort the nuclear attack that Teddy Maddox had initiated, especially because she had lost her baby not that long before, Grace was ready to give up and kill herself. Morgan was about to sacrifice their lives until he heard baby Mo’s cries echoing outside of the USS Pennsylvania. At that moment, Morgan stopped, scrambled outside the vessel, and found Rufus the bloodhound leading a zombified Rachel, Mo’s mother (With Mo on her back), to him. With the baby in his arms, Morgan had found his purpose for carrying on. Grace, however, not so much.

Between a combination of the loss of her baby, and her knowledge of the kind of hellish nightmare a nuclear warhead would create for the area around them, Grace still wanted to die. In the near two months since the bomb dropped, nothing had changed.

In fact, it might have even gotten worse.

As Grace herself explains to Morgan, he had been the one doing most of the heavy lifting when it came to Mo. He’d been the one braving the wasteland, he’d been the one acting as a parent, and he’d been the one constantly trying to find her food. Yet, at the same time, even after spending hours roaming the ruins of Galveston (and nearly getting jumped in the process), she was willing to go right back out into the wasteland.

These are two symptoms of depression manifesting at the same time. On the one hand, Grace was becoming disinterested in normal activities (In this case, caring for Mo). On the other, she was becoming increasingly less interested in her self-preservation by being willing to go back out into the irradiated environment outside of the Pennsylvania, knowing that more than six hours of exposure would be fatal. She was, effectively, trying to create a suicide mission.

This is what happens when you lose your reason for living. You stop caring about things, including living. Some take it a step further like Grace was doing, even willing to guarantee herself a miserable death (radiation poisoning), so long as it was a death.

Of course, miserable deaths will not be in short supply in a zombie apocalypse. You can easily give yourself a slow death by getting bitten and letting yourself turn, or the fast but equally agonizing death of being torn to shreds by a herd of zombies.

The thing is, you don’t want this. Death, however it comes, isn’t good. It doesn’t solve problems; it just replaces them with one big one. You need to find something to keep you going, something to keep you willing to live. Whether that’s those you’ve lost, those you still have, or even giving yourself a future, you need to find something to keep you living. There is no alternative.

And that’s our Walking Dead Survival Rule Of The Week! Survival doesn’t just happen in a zombie apocalypse: You have to want to survive. You need a reason what that reason for surviving might be depending on you. It could be for your friends, your family, those you’ve lost, those you want to have a future; it could be you. Whatever it might be, if you’re going to learn how to survive in the apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!