Remaining hopeful is I think the single greatest challenge I’ve faced throughout the course of my illness – certainly since I began treatment almost a year ago. To remain hopeful seems such a simple concept and yet, I have found that mustering even one morsel is near impossible some days. And tragically so, since hope is an absolute necessity to healing and to life beyond healing. In the absence of hope, lies pain, sorrow, heartache, despair, depression, and death. At least I have found this to be true in my own life.
This journey that I have been on has been treacherous and near unbearable but the one thing that always allowed me to keep fighting and to not give up, was a hope for what the future would hold. Sometimes it was just the little things, like when I would again get to feel the pavement beneath my feet as I sprinted down a trail, sweat dripping from every inch. Or when I would get to wake-up again, rested, with the ability to shower, put on make-up, pick out clothes that looked good (instead of just what wouldn’t hurt too badly to wear that day), and to then drive myself in a car to a job where I could interact with normal people … people who didn’t ask about how sick I was or about how my treatment was going. Other times that hope included the big dreams, like: seeing the world firsthand, with the love of my life, while checking off visits to countries that had been added to our ever-growing bucket-list. Or running our own business that would allow us to lend support and give hope to others, as so often has been done for us. Hope. It was the key to waking up each morning, no matter how much my body ached, my stomach turned, or my mind refused to form coherent thoughts, hope kept me in the game.
That was what made this one particular stay in the hospital so terrifying. Without going into detail, that hospital visit, and those doctors who patted my shoulders with sympathetic, patronizing hands, stole hope away from me. Or rather, I allowed them to steal it from me. It was the first time that I lost faith in God and men, and in the idea that I would one day have a life beyond my tortured existence brought on by this horrid illness. The longing for the above mentioned things, big or small, had faded. The hope I had that I would one day have any semblance of a normal life, leaked from my very soul. I could feel it in every inch of my body. My heart ached beyond any heartache that could be brought on by a person. My thoughts like the driest, loneliest desert on earth, emptied. I was hollow and I ached, not just in my body now, but in my soul. And it terrified me.
Because of how I was raised or perhaps just because of who I am, I have always thought about death. Not in a morbid sort of way, but in that I have always been keenly aware that I am not an invincible, immortal creature – or at least that my body is not. Or maybe it was because on some subconscious level I was aware of the constant battle being waged within my blood, brain, heart, and my whole being. Perhaps the disease made me too hyper-aware of what I was experiencing physically, internally. Or maybe it was from the vivid nightmares I still remember having as a child (of all things to remember). In any case, these feelings and thoughts seemed to intensify at certain times in my life – like when my husband I and almost died on our honeymoon, drowning in the violent currents of North Shore Ocean. Or when I was thrown around the inside of a car as someone smashed, full speed, into the side of it. Or when my heart would beat wildly our of my chest as I lay incapacitated from the illness, unable to move my limbs or raise my head, for twenty two hours out of the day. None of these times or thoughts however felt like what I experienced that day in the hospital.
As I sank down onto the floor of the bathroom in my hospital room, stifling the noise trying to force itself from my mouth and nose, tears streamed down my face – I didn’t dare let the nurse or doctors hear me. I faced death again. This time it wasn’t in the theoretical. Not only did it feel real, it felt imminent. It was just a matter of time. All hope, big or small, was gone. I was caught between the numbness of depression and the fear-stricken anxiety that consumed by body. I cried uncontrollably – the medical gown soaking up the tears as they fell. It was in that moment that I realized that I had never truly known what it was to feel alone. It was in that very moment that I was overtaken by a force I can’t explain. Terrified, hopeless, and distraught.
I picked up my phone and, through the tears, began thumbing through the pictures I had saved on it – perhaps I was grasping at anything that may help to ease the pain. As odd as it sounds, it was if I was watching someone else do this. I had no idea why I was doing this. I had made no conscious choice to. I was simply compelled to – no other explanation. As I opened the app, clicked on a random picture, I was surprisingly and instantly comforted by what I saw. I’m usually not (or at least I wasn’t) one for saving cheesy, inspirational messages but without any memory of it, I apparently had decided to save one at some point in time. It read: “You are going to want to give up. Don’t” –simple as that. Something about those words sunk into my soul. It was as if I was destined to read them. They reminded me that I wasn’t alone. Even in the darkest despair I had ever known, I felt the presence of God. Beyond religion, beyond the opinions of people, beyond anything I had ever experienced, I knew that I was not alone. It wasn’t as if things suddenly got easier, that my heart wasn’t beating abnormally, or that I was symptom free, but I had a renewed emotional strength – a new will to live that made me want to keep fighting. A semblance of hope.
It’s amazing …the things that bring us comfort in our times of sorrow and pain are almost never what we expect – a lesson that I am continuously learning in this life. Maybe my mind is too limiting and if the obvious choice were always the answer, I would never learn the lessons that I have/am. On that night though, the night that I was sure marked the beginning of the end, my life was changed. I thank God for that. I didn’t “See the light” or win any equivalency to the lotto – nothing like that, but what did happen is that everything I thought I knew about life was turned on its head. In my darkest hour, I felt peace – a true hope that I had never experienced before. It went beyond my dreams for a future or longing for an accomplished goal. I just knew, simple as that, that there was purpose in my suffering. Perhaps it is beyond what I can explain or even fully understand myself, but to me, hope’s existence and permanency are embedded in my life forever.
I guess I will leave you with this. Remember that no matter what you are going through, no matter how big or how small, there is hope. A hope that is beyond the limitations of the solutions of your mind, beyond the obvious, and most definitely beyond the tangible. Like me, you may not fully understand it or see it in an obvious way, but it is there. You are not alone. Your purpose and impact in this life are greater than you can possibly know. When you are in your darkest hour, don’t forget about your lightest hour. There is hope. Always.
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” -Barbara Kingsolver