Holding Hope Gently

Reasons for hope and hopelessness in shared experience

Last week, I listened to an episode of Everything Happens while preparing eggs on the stove. I had just cracked the egg into the pan, when the guest shared that she had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in her 20s.

I froze. I might have dumbly smiled to myself. I almost fried the egg. She had the same diagnosis as me just a few decades before.

I sat down to my computer and wrote her an email. Thanking her for sharing her story, I told her how much it meant to me because I don’t know anyone personally with my diagnosis.

Her detailed reply was a hug wrapped in an email. She told me I could ask her anything. We went back and forth for a week.

One of the questions I have held, afraid to ask until now, is what recovery will feel like in my body. I want to know if I’ll be able to spend time outdoors, on the water, start moving like I used to. That, and also importantly, when can I realistically expect the return of my eyebrows?

When she replied that she was surprised how resilient her body was in her recovery (and that she didn’t take note of her eyebrows’ regrowth because it wasn’t traumatizing), I wrote back:

I've re-read your email at least five times by now because it makes me so hopeful!! There's no other word for it and I haven't felt hopeful a whole heck of a lot over the past year.

Although I am not yet finished with treatments and typically feel pretty terrible after I get immune-boosting shots as I did last week, this week my body surprised me. I spent a late afternoon in the sun clearing the dead branches and leaves from my garden to make space for new green growth that has already begun to break through the soil. And in the evening before sunset, my partner and I paddled our new kayak in the Allegheny river for the first time this year against the wind and gentle waves.

It felt good. But hope is a complicated thing.

Just before clearing the leaves and brown branches from the garden, I spent the day at work messaging nonprofit leaders struggling to keep up with the job of welcoming new Afghan arrivals as they watch hospitals bombed in Ukraine and a friend sharing that he may be dying. As I emptied the final wheelbarrow of dried life into the woods that evening, I watched the sun set, red and orange behind the bare trees. I entered a Zoom room a few minutes late as another friend told us his grandson died last week; he was only a couple of years younger than myself.

Pema Chödrön writes about hope as the partner of fear. Like fear, it is a home in which we live in an imagined future, a shadow world of possibilities that are anything but promised. Hope can give us energy and optimism but, like fear, require us to pack our belongings and move out of our home here, in this world.

As I prepare for my final treatment next week, I imagine holding hope like a feather in the palm of my open hand. If the wind picks up it might blow away, I expect it will at some point because I’ve never been able to control the wind. But one day I might tell you how another feather settled in my hand, or you will, and we’ll know the feeling.

What I’m loving right now:

• When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön (book)

• Everything Happens by Kate Bowler (podcast)

• The Isolation Journals by Suleika Jaouad (Substack community)

• Mysticism for Beginners by Adam Zagajewski (poetry)

• Coda (film)

• Homemade cream cheese (recipe)

• Norsemen (TV show, gratuitous and hilarious)