Losing Hope

“SHE’S GONE.”

In that moment, my knees gave out from under me and buckled, my back hitting the glass wall of the post office entrance, where I had been shipping home boxes of my belongings from Prague back to the US, as I slid slowly to the floor. I have no memory of what thoughts may have been rushing through my mind, just a vague sense of the blood draining from my head and extremities and the sound of buzzing in my ears. I could hear my brother, Rob’s, voice on the other end of the line, but I have no idea what he was saying. Then, suddenly, the line went dead, the call had dropped. I scrambled to dial Cory’s number, wanting desperately to hear her voice and know that she, Cathy’s beloved twin, was OK. As the call was answered by my brother-in-law’s, Reynold’s, sleepy voice, a rush of hope swirled in me: if Reynold was peacefully asleep, Cathy couldn’t possibly be dead. There had to have been mistake! I asked him if I could speak to Cory, and he answered that she was at the hospital with Cathy. I hung up the phone, elated in a blurry fog of hope and denial, even as the words of Rob still rang in my ears. Next, I dialed my sister, Christy’s, home phone, seeking the reassurance that somehow Rob had misunderstood, that Cathy was still alive, even if the situation was very serious. Christy’s husband, Glenn, answered with something in his voice I couldn’t identify. I barely let him answer before I blurted out, “Just tell me she’s OK, Glenn. Just tell me Cathy is OK.” After a long pause, he replied with great tenderness, “I wish I could, Carrie. I wish I could.”

The reality of what this meant sent me into physical shock. In the moments that followed that final phone call, I only remember seeing black spots in front of my eyes, my brain shutting down almost entirely. I have no memory of how I was lifted from the floor and guided to a taxi, only a hazy recollection of myself crawling on my hands and knees up the stairs to my apartment once I arrived back at my flat. I have often thought that shock is this beautiful mechanism with which our bodies, our minds, will only accept as much as we can handle before they shut down and cradle us in a soft, cloudy gauze of black and unknowing. It feels like a kind of gift, really, that protects us from completely imploding when the very worst thing has just occurred. Even as the logical part of my brain processed Rob’s words telling me that Cathy had died – knew there was no way my brother could have misunderstood something so important, so devastating – another part of my brain was denying it, refusing to acknowledge its validity. In my panic and denial, my brain held out hope, however irrational, that my brother had somehow gotten it wrong. That irrational hope was the only thing keeping me tethered to this world, the only thing keeping me from completely shutting down and imploding, until Glenn reaffirmed the truth, and I was left with nothing to hold onto.

Recalling that moment, re-living the instance in which everything changed, can still bring me to my knees, even 20 years later. Even from this distance, there’s something so raw and immediate that rushes up inside of me, something that feels unfinished. Despite feeling like I’ve moved so far through my grief over these last two decades, remembering this moment can still knock the wind out of me and bring me to tears. Anyone who has experienced the death of someone they love understands that this grief remains with us forever. We somehow manage to keep walking around and living while this giant hole continues to gape within us. And it really is a gaping hole. They say time heals all wounds, but I know now that it’s simply not true. Time doesn’t heal the wound. It doesn’t fill the gaping hole. It simply teaches us to function in spite of the hole. I can only imagine that it is akin to losing a limb to amputation – an amputee never forgets the limb is missing; he simply retrains himself to live a different way. Still, the awareness of what has been lost is always present.

I think the hardest part for me as I recall that moment, remember that phone call, is looking directly at the exact point when all of my hope was ripped away. Hearing my brother-in-law acknowledge the reality, hearing how he wished he could delay my own arrival at that reality, was almost worse than hearing my brother Rob’s voice say, “She’s gone.” Because in that instance when I was forced to acknowledge the reality that my sister was, in fact, dead – that I would never again see her smile, hear her laugh, or feel her arms around me in a hug – I let go of hope and it nearly drowned me. I spent so long after that, so many dark moments, feeling the tug of hopelessness, of sadness and loneliness and rage, pulling me under in a grip so tight it often felt difficult to breathe. I suffered from panic attacks and sought ways to numb and self-destruct in an attempt to keep my mind focused on a different kind of pain, one that felt less scary or final. It wasn’t until much later when, with the gift of time and evolving perspective, I began rebuilding a sense of hope in my life that I felt able to breathe again. I think that sense came from my willingness and ability to reimagine joy as distinct from happiness and to understand hope as separate from happy endings. I have begun to understand that things will not always turn out the way I want, circumstances will not always be happy or easy, I will never be able to outrun loss; but I still have the choice to build my home in a place of hope rather than fear, to look for the joy even as it sits right there beside my grief.

Throughout my life, in all the periods in which I have felt the sharp sting of grief, whether from the loss of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or the transition from one stage of life to a new chapter, the only thing that brought me through to the other side was hope: a belief that I would find a way to make sense of things again, to take what I’d been handed and find a way to make meaning out of it. I think that’s why reliving the moment of that phone call following Cathy’s death can bring up so many strong emotions for me. In that instance, when the reality and finality of her death became unavoidable, all the hope I had in me felt as if it was ripped away. I am beginning to wonder if, perhaps, this is why I cling so doggedly to hope now in times of crisis or doubt. Hope feels like the lifeline – the buoy that, like joy, can keep me afloat when the waves of grief and anxiety and panic threaten to pull me under and drown me.

Perhaps, here, I am really using hope as a synonym for my idea of faith. Just as Vaclav Havel described hope as, “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out,” I am often drawn to a similar definition of faith. In a quote most often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., faith is described as, “taking the first step without seeing the whole staircase.” In both of these, I see the same idea of believing in a way forward, even when we don’t know how it will all end. Without this belief, I feel lost, rudder-less in a stormy ocean. But my hope, my faith, reminds me that things will ultimately make sense if I just keep moving forward. Or as Cathy so often noted, wisely, almost prophetically: it’s not about the destination, but the journey. No matter where this path – where our grief, our joy, our losses, and our successes – may take us, we just have to keep walking forward. One foot in front of the other; nothing more, nothing less.