After despair

Monday 22 May

Sounds almost positive doesn't it? 'After despair'.

I hope I haven't lulled you into a false sense of reassurance that everything is feeling much better now.

It's not.

The world will never be right again.

But I guess what has happened is that we have moved beyond what might be called the acute phase of grief and into the chronic.

There are times now when we are not incapacitated by grief and sadness.
When we smile, or laugh, or enjoy.
When we do things.

It's partly because, as one of my good friends said to me, we just have to carry on, that's what we do.

But perhaps it's also because as human beings we are not capable of doing extremes for ever. Most of our experiences and feelings moderate in intensity with time. 

I've recently finished reading a book called Elantris. It's set in a magical world in which there is a city in which the residents live a dull, twilight existence, and where pain never dissipates - every cut, bruise and graze stays with them forever, and they either learn to live with it or descend into non-existence, consumed by the distress and not capable of interacting with the world at all.

It's sink or swim, but that's a false choice as you can always swim with the right support anyone you.

And if you can swim, it's a lot harder to choose to sink, even if it's sometimes exactly what you want to do. 

As both Moses said in Deuteronomy, and Renton in Trainspotting: 
Choose Life. 

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Last week it was three months since Shani died.

Three months since that terrible day when we realized that we'd never see her smile again and all hope was banished from the world.

I used to write these blogs as a poem to hope - as a way to encapsulate the dread that I was feeling, to speak and share the unspeakable, to make it real and less terrible and easier to bear. 

And to make me realize that there was hope.

The black cloud was always on the horizon but never directly overhead.

The operation or procedure was always dangerous and risky but laden with possibility that things might get better for Shani.

The long term prognosis was uncertain and bleak but who knew what would happen to medical science over the course of the years ahead?

But what hope is there now?

We cannot hope for fun times ahead for Shani, for sunshine, laughter, snow balls, holidays.

For birthdays, singing, school plays, play dates. 

We cannot hope for medical breakthroughs, for stem cell cardiac regeneration, less risky surgery, heart-lung transplants.

What is there left?

There has to be something, for what is life without meaning, without a goal to strive for, without hope?

So I'm starting to wonder if I need to find ways of growing and building hope and meaning among the shattered remains of what has been left behind - the hole and emptiness in our lives that was created when Shani died.

Maybe one is simply to find the strength to cope and to support my family and find wonderful and fun things to do together.

There might be the hope that Shani's memory will burn brightly in other people's lives, that they will remember her fondly and kindly, and perhaps in some small way be inspired by the light that shone during her short life.

And perhaps the desire to build on Shani's memory by helping to improve the lives of other children with life-limiting conditions.

Without these things it's so very hard.

But with something to strive for, perhaps that will help to lift sorrow, to calm anguish and to ease despair.

Or at least make them easier to live with.

As Viktor Frankl put it in Man's Search for Meaning: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.'