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I want by the following sentence to express that death causes anxiety for souls:

And why do souls become anxious of it?..

It refers to death

I have looked for the phrase, but it gets corrected each time for "anxious about". I think those two phrases are kind of opposites to each other because, here, souls are not concerned about death but afraid (anxious to be more precise) of it.

Also, I want to preserve the sentence structure as it is if possible.

So, is anxious of right to convey the intended meaning (in bold)?

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    If you're so anxious to preserve the of, you'd probably try and use apprehensive instead. Anxious does not usually collocate with of, afaik.
    – Michael Login
    Aug 7, 2019 at 9:05
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    Your first sentence should be "death causes anxiety..." In the block quoted sentence, if you want to use "anxious" then you need "about", as the spell checker advises.
    – Weather Vane
    Aug 7, 2019 at 9:06
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    You would not say concerned of either. It's concerned about and anxious about. Using of with either word is unidiomatic at best and ungrammatical at worst. If you insist on the specific phrase anxious of, then the answer here will be that it's wrong. You can change the word that comes before the preposition (such that of becomes okay), but only about works with anxious.
    – Jason Bassford
    Aug 7, 2019 at 16:27
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    @JasonBassford Your comment seems to be an actual answer to the question. Please move it to answers so I can vote on it.
    – Valkor
    Aug 8, 2019 at 7:48
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    @tasneemzh The distinction made in that post is erroneous because anxious about the success of our team can, itself, apply to all the meanings discussed. There is no need to use the (I believe) erroneous anxious of for one of the meanings.
    – Jason Bassford
    Aug 9, 2019 at 7:25

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Answered in the comments:

"You would not say concerned of either. It's concerned about and anxious about. Using of with either word is unidiomatic at best and ungrammatical at worst. If you insist on the specific phrase anxious of, then the answer here will be that it's wrong. You can change the word that comes before the preposition (such that of becomes okay), but only about works with anxious." – Jason Bassford

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