On Hope.

Hanging on to Hope

Don Delillo paints a vision of American that is bleak and inelegant. David Bell is something of an anti-hero; pathological, misanthropic. He’s got so many issues, one needs a magazine rack to catalog them all.
It would be easy to pigeonhole him as a closet case homosexual: his predilection for checking himself out in the mirror and describing his every outfit, his sex-worship of Burt Lancaster, but most especially given the predominance his mother’s influence plays in his life, which in turn leads to an Oedipal complex where in he shows signs of adulating his mother to the exception of all other women in his life, who are for the most part just so many blank ejaculations. At the same time, he holds contempt if not hatred for his father is someone who is crass and only marginally related in any way to himself.
However, most poignantly, it is his own self-loathing for what he does, and who he is which propels him out of the Heart of Darkness which is New York and into the fiery hell that is Americana.
It’s a journey of self-discovery and innocence lost, particularly as he ruminates on where and when he lost said innocence and comes up lacking. Perhaps he was never innocent, a born sinner with the stain of Eve about him as soon as he breeched the womb.
He casts about, searching for something, anything to give him hope that there could be something good and decent and clean in this world, abandoning all that is familiar to him; probing the depths of the Heartland as he tries to capture something of that essence on his small movie camera.
However, I believe it is a mission doomed from the start since David has neither the eye nor the ability to comprehend goodness even should he chance across it.
It is as though he wears a very black and distorted pair of sunglasses through which he can only see shadows and facades.
I am now several years older than David Bell would have been in the story, and though my realm of life experience is considerably wider than his, I too have gotten caught up in the crushing, burning sense that we’re all fucked—this country, this planet, humanity as a whole might as well just pack it in.
The Evil Empire is one built upon the indoctrination of hapless citizens to think alike, look alike, desire the same things, and to fear and hate any boat-rockers.
Success is defined by whoever fits the mold most perfectly, that the mold maker may cry out to the multitude, “See here! Here is one who has done well! Take notice and obey!”
High drama; true, but pretty realistic, n’est pas?
On the other hand, there was a time when I removed myself from that design, and after five years of struggling, hoping for life to begin again, I can offer my personal experience to show that there is indeed hope.
Consider this: I have a good friend whose mother is dying. She has been ill for some time, and she is advanced in age, so rather than letting her die in an institution or hospital he has taken her into his home and hired assistants to help care for her so that she will live her last days in some amount of comfort and as free from pain as they can manage.
For this among many reasons I have great respect for him. I believe what he is doing is kind, and brave, and strong, and loving. And I shudder at how painful it must be for him to watch her slip away from this world.
Death and dying are subjects especially close to my heart, surpassed only by life and healing in my daily thoughts. Having returned from the dead as I seem to, the riddle of mortality has become rather close to my heart, and I like to believe that I have become a bit of an expert on it, and that is why even though I understand his motivations and her longing for peace I have been somewhat troubled by their situation nonetheless.
I know she is old and in pain and diagnosed as being terminally ill. The reality of things is that she is going to die and all they believe they can hope for is that it will be soon and painless. That is what the doctors and experts said, and that is what common sense and practicality would confirm. But I am disturbed just the same.
Losing hope, that’s what I’m talking about.
Giving up.
Throwing in the towel.
Bowing to the fates.
Having fought the good fight, and graciously conceding to the winner.
That is what makes me feel so sad and frustrated and angry all at once, because despite the fact that I know they feel they have done all they can do and then some; despite the knowledge that we are mortal and eventually must die; despite faith and belief in a cycle of life upon which rests everything I hold dear and important; I still want to urge them not to give up and to keep hope alive.
Hope.
A beautiful word, a precious treasure.
The driving force in every action performed by every creature on earth. It is what motivates an army of starving men, what impels a politician to argue to the last. It gives faith to the lost and sustenance to the weak. It is the promise of spring after the bleakest winter, a soothing hand on the shoulder of a weeping child.
Six months ago I gave up on hope. Somehow I lost that ability to see a far off dawn in the midst of my dark night, and bruised in spirit and torn in heart I realized something very profound and sad, yet very true and wise—without hope I was as good as dead and I needn’t bother continuing my life any longer. So, I did what I thought right and quietly strove to end my misery without even the hope that I would find a better existence on the other side.
For five days I lay in a tortured coma, to all appearances mentally vacant as the husk of my body writhed in animalistic pain. The doctors evaluated to the best of their abilities my situation and my odds of any sort of recovery and spoke the most devastating words my family would ever hear: “Danny has essentially no chance of waking up, and now is the time when you should decide whether or not to discontinue his life support and just let his body die.”
In what mental picture I have been able to reconstruct of what happened then I see Anthony and Caren slumping to the floor bawling helplessly. My sister cries uncontrollably in the arms of my brother whose own face is haggard and streaked with tears. Then the fighting begins as they tear at themselves and curse impotently and somehow strive to keep from going insane from their frustration and sorrow. Caren believes that I wouldn’t want to go on in that state and they should help me die. Autumn and my mother stubbornly insist that they should cling to whatever chances remain no matter how slim, but their determination crumbles as reality set in. Anthony clings helplessly to my unresponsive hand and grits his teeth in pain and rage and sadness while my brother Glen assumes the mantle of responsibility for the whole family and nods his head weakly to the doctors in defeat and acceptance. My body would be allowed to die, even as by all indications my mind had already gone before it.
They gave up hope, even though it ripped through their hearts and wrenched their stomachs, and they began to prepare for the next steps they would have to take.
And the next day I woke up.
I have read a thousand stories detailing accounts of miracles.
Healing the sick.
Raising the dead back to life.
Walking on water.
Turning water into wine.
All that Sunday school crap piled on a stack of supermarket tabloids and paperback sci-fi novels held together with a glue mixed of superstition and blind faith.
Bullshit, right?
Until it happened to me.
The doctors agreed on nothing in my case except that they couldn’t tell what was wrong with me. They tried a dozen therapies and ran a battery of tests.
“Danny is suffering withdrawal shock that only heroin addicts go through,” one claimed.
“No, no, it’s residual effects of the cerebral malaria he contracted several years ago,” another maintained.
“It’s an advanced case of HIV infection.”
“No, it’s definitely a build up of ecstasy in his system.”
“Uh, uh, it’s got to be the overdose of 60 Percocets.”
“It’s probably anoxia from when he finally stopped breathing.”
“Actually, I reckon it’s toxemia from when his liver collapsed under all that acetaminophen.”
“No, really it’s--,”
“What most clinical studies seem to indicate--,”
“You should probably try--,”
“Maybe if we--,”
No, they didn’t know, and all they could agree upon is that I was as good as gone, and never in all their combined years of experience had they seen a case like mine, and they had never seen anyone with a case even vaguely similar to mine survive the trauma.
So, they recommended giving up hope, and they were wrong.
Not only did I wake up, but I was also ambulatory, and within days I regained the ability to walk and feed myself, and in another week or so, I learned to read and write again, and by the end of the month I was showering and shaving on my own, and 22 days after I was admitted to the emergency room, I was discharged and returned home to my dog and cat and husband.
I myself have since gone through the reams of test results, MRI’s, CT’s and such; read the variety of evaluations and spoken to the residents, specialists, nurses, and other staff; and interviewed and interrogated my family and friends who were there, trying somehow, some way, to put it all together and figure our how I managed to not just revive, but recuperate as fully as I have when in the end, even I have to agree that all the evidence pointed inexorably at my death.
Therefore, I admitted to the miracle and as living and breathing proof decided that there was hope in the world after all, and steeling myself with that knowledge I have forced my way past innumerable obstacles and felt the light of dawn shine at last on my upturned face.
It hasn’t been easy.
In fact, I can’t count the number of times I have almost buckled under the weight of my problems and succumbed to the temptation to return to the shroud.
When I first came home I was stricken with an incapacitating stutter, which coupled with a severe hearing loss, and tremors, which prevented writing, or typing almost completely sealed me off from the rest of the world. I was also stabbed with horrible panic attacks, and for weeks I couldn’t face even small groups of people without trembling in fear, and any sort of confrontation was impossible fro me to handle. I couldn’t work and didn’t know how or where to look for help. Even as I discovered various agencies, I was constantly denied my pleas for assistance, and every day became an exercise in frustration and torn patience. Even in my dreams, shadow-specters attempted to convince me to give up and slit my wrists or find some other way to die and just end my pain.
But somehow I have managed to cling to some tiny shred of hope, some miniscule fragment of the promise of the sun. Even as my marriage dissolved and my best friend rejected me I have held onto the hope that I will someday love again.
I lost my apartment and my personal things and all my money, and yet I clasp that tiny light to my breast, guarding it with my life, for it is my life.
I sank into strangling debt and resorted to prostitution suffering unspeakable indignities just to survive all the while as my mind has cried out “For what?
Is the wispy dream that somehow things will eventually get better worth the agony, worth the pain and sorrow?
Why don’t you just give up?”
Indeed.
Because when all is black and I return from the night bleeding and sore, there is a dog who licks my ear and rests his head in my lap.
Because when I stand at the window and look out into the gloom, a ray of light shoots down through the clouds and sparkles on the new fallen snow.
Because after a summer of torment when I had lost the ability to even walk, I have spun in a flash and blur of radiance above the faces of a cheering crowd and found my lips smiling on their own.
Because what sort of lesson would it be to my nephews if I gave up now when I have come so far?
What sort of thanks would it be to Tucson. if I abandoned him after he has stood by my side from the moment I returned to him?
And why would I do that when I have hope to keep me going strong?
I have in my lifetime heard a veritable cornucopia of clichés trumpeting the power of positive thinking, read a million inspirational bumper stickers and posters, and I’ll be the first to admit that I have rolled my eyes and sneered more times than I can count, but since my return to life I have finally learned to see the good in the world and find the magic that I had somehow missed prior to my suicide attempt.
I hope to counsel my friend and his mother not to give up hope, and while they may have to bow to nature in the end, I would ask them to wait until the end, and all the while to keep hope alive.
For without hope there truly is no life, yet life itself may hold its own surprises.
I’m proof of that.