Hope

Hope is defined as ‘a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen’. It is nothing more than a feeling we choose to have about something or a certain situation. I can hope for snow to fall on Christmas but I have no control over whether or not it does. And the outcome of this really has no bearing on my life. I won’t sit and cry if it doesn’t snow, it will be whatever it will be. I can hope my daughter does well on her math test, but again, my hoping will not change the outcome. It is up to her to study and do her best. Hope is a feeling; it is not tangible and yet we speak of it as if it is. We say we’re ‘holding onto hope’ for whatever it is we are wishing for, but we cannot touch it or hold it in our hands. Is it as futile as throwing a penny into a fountain and making a wish? Do we really expect to get what we’re wishing for just by performing that simple act? Or is it just something we do to make ourselves feel better?

My aunt started her battle with lung cancer back in May. A few weeks ago, she developed an infection and took a turn for the worse. In the beginning doctors weren’t exactly sure what was happening and answers were hard to come by so we, her family, were a little in the dark, not knowing too much. Still, some family members remained hopeful that she would recover, get better and leave the hospital. As days went by, I wasn’t one of those people. I didn’t see a happy ending when the facts were staring me in the face. She had an infection, something she couldn’t fight because the chemo treatment she was getting to fight the cancer completely destroyed her immune system, she no longer had one. And while the doctors tried to fight the infection, she couldn’t get chemo to fight the cancer so she had two things attacking her and she was left with no defense. No matter how hard she might have wanted to fight, her body just couldn’t, she had no weapons. How was I supposed to be hopeful about her situation? I didn’t know how to do that.

The facts were telling me that we would eventually lose her, much sooner than any of us had ever thought. The facts were screaming at me and hope was crouched down in a corner hiding her face. I couldn’t look over there. I had to protect my heart and go with the facts. I didn’t want to waste my time hoping for something that I didn’t believe would happen. When I think about it now, I cry. I cry because I feel that maybe I was selfish in only looking out for myself. I cry because losing hope maybe looks like I gave up on my aunt and I would never want her to think that. I struggle with it because I don’t know what to think. By losing hope did I give up on her? Or did I surrender to the situation? I have to choose the latter so I don’t live with any guilt for the rest of my life. I have to choose the latter because the odds were stacked against her so high that the strongest person in the world couldn’t overcome them. I have to selfishly choose the latter to once again protect my heart.

We pray, we have hope, we have faith. Are these three things the same or different? I guess that depends on each individual and what they believe. For me, they are all different. I hope for little things. For things that won’t really affect me if they don’t go my way. We hope for things every day, more than once a day, more than one thing. And by the next day we maybe forget what we hoped for, or it’s no longer relevant, so we hope for something new. Or maybe it’s the same thing every day. I pray when I don’t know what else to do. When I don’t want to think about things anymore, I pray that someone or something makes the decision for me. When things are out of my control, I pray that they work out, I put it into the hands of the Gods to figure it out for me. My faith is what I go to when I truly believe something is going to work out a certain way. If I know something is meant to be then I put my faith into it and I don’t give it a second thought. My faith lets me know that everything will work out as planned. My uncle recently had a very risky surgery, one that the doctors weren’t sure he would make it through. The day of his surgery I didn’t lean on hope and, honestly, I didn’t pray. I went to my faith. I refused to believe that he wouldn’t survive. I refused to believe that he was led on this path, to go through everything he went through, just to have him not make it in the end. My faith wouldn’t let me believe anything else other than that he would be ok, and he was. It could have easily gone the other way, but for me, my faith wouldn’t let me believe that.

How do you know when to have hope, when to rely on your faith or when to let it all go and just pray? I honestly have no idea. Maybe the best thing to do is have a little bit of each in every situation. There is no right or wrong way to go about this life we have been given. We each have to choose what works best for our mind, body and soul. And that will be different for every one of us. I don’t have the answers, I wish I did, but I just can’t find them most days. And I can either let that mess with my head, or I can wait for them to come find me.

My Aunt Joann passed away on November 9^th. Two weeks later I sit here still struggling. It’s too hard to think about most days. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t thought about her or cried for her. As much as I try to distract myself, she pops into my mind out of nowhere. I know this is going to take a while to get over and maybe I’ll never get over it, it’s too soon to tell what will happen down the line. When she passed, I prayed that she went peacefully. I prayed that she felt no pain. I didn’t hope for these things because I needed them to be true, I needed them to be something more than just wishful thinking. I prayed that the universe showed her some mercy. That the Gods finally made something easy for her, because her life was hard most of the time. I have faith that she knew she was loved by me because I ended every text and every phone call with the words ‘I love you’. There is no place in my heart to believe that she didn’t know how much she meant to me. My faith lets me know that she was welcomed with open arms, into a better place, by her older sister. This is something I need to believe, not something I hope for.

Is it foolish to hope for things? Is hoping for something the bare minimum we can do? I don’t know, and maybe we’re not supposed to know the answers to these questions. For me, I need something bigger than hope most times. I need something stronger to believe in. I’m not saying I give up on hope completely, but for the intensity of life I have to live with the belief that everything happens for a reason, and what is meant to be will be. The hardest part is not knowing the reason for things right away, and it’s even harder to think we may never know those reasons. And the hardest thing to do is wait for your life to work out the way it’s supposed to, to wait for what will be to actually happen. While we wait, all we can do is have faith that everything will be okay one day, and everything we go through in life will bring us closer to where we need to be.