The End of Hoping

There are roses in the dining room. And here on my desk. All coming with an apologies for the awkwardness of acknowledging a pain that is all to common but still taboo. I am grateful for the flowers, the expressions of condolence. 33 years of estrangement is in itself a very long grieving process. And I can only speak for myself but I am not feeling celebratory – it is not that kind of relief.

But it is a relief. To be rid of this burden of hope is a relief. Looking through a Buddhist lens I can see how exhausting it is: to use so much energy carrying around the weight of an imaginary future, projecting a narrative onto lives – and every second writing and rewriting to accommodate the disappointment. It is not living in the moment. It is moving through the world hobbled by fiction.

After my second child was born and I once again found myself rewriting a script – trying to embed the hope in some future watershed moment, I asked a priest if it was all right for me to let go of it: let go of the hope of my mother “coming around”, and to move on. He told me to talk to a psychiatrist. Sometimes I believe this conversation was when I gave up any hope or faith in the Church and I moved on from that cornerstone of my childhood. If the church deferred to pschyology for its moral compass, what use was it?

The odd thing was that I had given up on my childhood God long before that. I was clinging to the hope of a community, I think. In a foreign land. In a situation people hush and sweep into the offices of people trained to deal with “problems” like disordered thinking and ineffective emotional management.

In the animal world, being pushed out of the herd means death. Who are we kidding? We humans. There are so many kinds of death. Some good.

Emily Dickinson said that hope is the thing with feathers. But for me, hope is too often the thing that sinks to the muddy bottom, dragging you with it.

Letting go can be good.