Hope and despair

Dawn out my study window, breaking as I wrote this

Day 40.

A couple of months ago I was in a workshop where participants had individual conversations with coaches and came in with their insights from those conversations. One person, who had been brooding and frustrated, came in with lightness and a smile—much happier than he had been. We asked why. “I have given up on hope for the future,” he told us, beaming. “Now I don’t have to fight so hard against the impossible odds.” I have been mulling his delight ever since.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I had three conversations about hope on the same day with three different friends. One talked about the joys of hope, the ways it was hope in her life that was transforming it out of darkness, into light. One talked about the horrors of hope, the way hope of a particular outcome pulled her out of her ability to live in the present and focused her too much on scrabbling for a thing she desired next. The third friend and I wandered over the whole terrain of it, confused.

Dad and me, in Pukerua Bay

Today I have woken up scattered, my thoughts in a tangle. Three days until round 3. Today is my last non-medical day. Tomorrow I get my blood taken to measure how much I’ve bounced back from the last onslaught. Sunday I begin my pre-meds. Monday morning I’m back at the hospital for the initial pains of the experience—the setting of the IV, the odd feeling of the anti-reaction drugs burning the inside of my veins as they go in, the chemo drugs themselves freezing cold up through my arms.  And then, slower on round one and so fast on round two, the side effects begin. Tuesday, just as I adjust a little to the various chemo side effects, the belly shot comes that knocks me out for a few days. The black mood from inside the swirl of it all that freezes all my resilience and turns me brittle and thin, the icy cracking skimcoat of a puddle after the first frost. I get lost in despair. Next week doesn’t look that good from here.

 

And then I'll heal. Then there is a rise from the darkness. The ice melts and the brittle reactions recede. The flu symptoms pass. The energy returns and I feel stronger and stronger. And that brings me to 23 May, the next day like today, counting down to the next round of chemo. Which, because I am a lucky woman and have only stage 2 cancer, is my last.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson so famously wrote, Dickinson who so rarely left her house and knew so little and so much about the world. I hear that line again and again as I face this coming dark week, hear the joy in the participant who let go of the thing with feathers, the alternating descant of my friends who craved and pushed hope away. If hope has feathers, does despair have scales? Are they the closest companions like their cousins joy and sorrow as Kahlil Gibran says, “Joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”

Kapiti island in the distance

I write a lot about giving up our desire to know and control the unknowable and uncontrollable future. I watch my mind cycle through and around these ideas. The pain that we know will come from current joy is not often enough to stop us from pursuing the joy—we have children and fall in love and ski with bad knees and give ourselves over to experiences we know will eventually break our bodies and our hearts. Similarly but much less pleasurably, the despair we can feel in a moment obliterates the joy that probably lurks around the next corner and we can begin to imagine that this moment overtakes it all. I remember feeling that way just about three weeks ago. I’m watching it come towards me now.

Dad and Michael, Pukerua Bay

Yesterday Dad and Michael and I went for a walk in Pukerua Bay, the next village down the coast. We  clambered over massive rocks and searched for starfish in mirror-still tide pools. We felt the sun hot on our faces and the wind cold at our back. The day was a jewel, and, unlike a jewel, dissolves. All our days dissolve. All our hopes and despairs and our bodies and our hearts.  Would we love our children so fiercely if we didn’t know that they would grow up and move away from us? Would we hold each other so tightly if we didn’t imagine that someday this would end, that time or cancer or circumstance would pull us away from each other? Would we feel so grateful for a glitteringly sunny day if we didn’t know that the clouds will gather and the rain will beat against the windows? I would like to hold the hope and despair close to me this week, and try not to let either of them sleep too deeply on the bed.