November 25, 2022
The day after Thanksgiving might be my favorite day of the year. There are rarely places anyone has to be. The weather makes it unlikely you’d jump up and say, “Let’s go for a walk!” (Years ago, in the New Hampshire countryside where my parents once lived, the prospect of being mistaken for a deer and getting shot was an additional deterrent.) Thanksgiving has been just a nice day to huddle with my people, read, and eat turkey sandwiches.
But it’s also a harbinger of the season of dying. I’ve always noticed that ailing elderly members of our church communities begin to slip away at about this time of year. Today, in one of my lung cancer Facebook groups, pictures of three vibrantly alive lung cancer people appear alongside announcements of their deaths.
At the start of stupid cancer, life seemed full of exhortations that were always capitalized and exclamation-pointed: Have Hope! Keep A Positive Attitude! Even my pharmaceutically-sponsored water bottle Proclaimed, “Hope. Daily.” (I just this moment realized they mean Hope in the form of an oval orange pill, taken daily. Hahaha– at an out-of-pocket cost of $85 per pill, what kind of hope are they really talking about?) OK, I remember thinking more than a year ago, if I have, say, three years to live, how do I choose to spend my time? Grim as the question was, I had to acknowledge some very hard realities to get to it.
Then came new realities: That lesion in the brain. How lung cancer cells often develop resistance to that miracle drug.
Sometimes the only thing you can do is go under the bed.
Then, meditation, exploring affirmation as a centering practice, watching myself inch my way into new ways of thinking about being.
Doesn’t it seem that all the Have Hope jazz is code for Have hope that they will find a cure ? The unsaid part of that sentence being, and then you won’t have to worry about dying.
I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s book, The Bean Trees. The treasure of that book came in the appendix: the transcript of a 2011 recorded conversation with professor Stephen L. Fisher. The topic was Community and Hope. In that conversation, Kingsolver said,
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. I would say that I am a hopeful person, although not necessarily optimistic. Here’s how I would describe it.
The pessimist would say, “it’s going to be a terrible winter; we are all going to die.“
The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.“
The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.“ And that’s where I lodge myself on the spectrum.
Hope is a mode of survival. I think hope is a mode of resistance. Hope is how parents get through the most difficult parts of their kids’ teenage years. Hope is how a cancer patient endures painful treatments. Hope is how people on a picket line keep showing up.
If you look at hope that way, it’s not a state of mind but some thing we actually do with our hearts in our hands, to navigate ourselves through the difficult passages. I think that as a fiction writer – or any other kind of writer – hope is a gift I can try to cultivate.
Hope is not waiting for some magic to happen to me or my life. Nope, no magic wands in this world, baby.
For me, today, hope is “not a state of mind but some thing we actually do with our hearts in our hands.” Action based on belief is how I wrote about it in a post just shy of a year ago.
The question I once asked, “How do I want to live if I have only x years to live?” now seems like a question that’s preoccupied with death. The new question I’m pondering, How do I want to dwell fully and completely in my life today, focuses instead on the active process of being alive.
As I’ve moved through diagnosis, treatment, side effects, metastases, and more treatment, I have come to new beliefs, or rediscovered beliefs the pace of my life or demands of my ego made impossible to recognize. Every day, I hope to practice living in ways that express those beliefs.
Belief. Practice. Hope.
Daily.
Thanks for reading.
