"Why not get your hopes up?"
I know this person and her husband well enough to suspect that they're good parents. Their daughter's quote is proof.
This young lady has got me thinking about the insulation created by cynicism, disbelief and pessimism. It's more cool to act with ironic armor than to be open and trusting - to welcome the future as a friend.
It took my wife Mary 5 and 1/2 years to die of ALS after she was diagnosed. From the first day she knew that she would steadily decline and then die from the illness. She was entirely lucid up until the very end. Yet she kept up hope during the entire course of her suffering and death. Mary took more heat from people about her hope than anything else. People were patronizing and sometimes sarcastic; they said she was obviously in denial, she needed to "come to terms" or move into the acceptance stage in their neat little Kubler-Ross mind maps. Folks seemed agitated and nervous and uncomfortable about Mary's hope.
Mary mentioned medical discoveries, or unusual outcomes or various other possible reasons for hope. She told me she mostly participated in hope not as a bargain about an outcome, but as a way of life. She lived her days permitting hope to surround the day that was hers at that moment. Naturally she had many darker and despairing feelings too. But as she put it, she permitted her life to be ruled by hope.
While I cringe at juxtaposing my wife and my mother in the same place, my mom used to have a favorite saying, "We live in hope." Sadly, in her later years she grew to say this with irony. Even so, that phrase is a good summary of the practice that Mary was able to follow with fidelity.
My friend's 18-year-old daughter has created a profound and beautiful orientation for her life. If she can find ways over the years to protect this openness, and be able to touch it when she needs to, she'll stand a good chance of living the kind of blessed, complete and life-giving existence that I know was Mary's.
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| Mary on the River Seine, 2 Years After Diagnosis |
