Hope
Hope is the marrow of our lives. If there is a complete and utter absence of any hope at all, life would be hard to sustain for long. We all need hope in order to keep living and we are fully alive until the moment of death, which means we need hope with us through the end. When people are facing death hope is integral in this process. Donovan and Pierce (1976) included hope in their “bill of rights” for every dying person; “The right to maintain a sense of hopefulness however changing the focus may be.”. If hope is alive within someone, let us nurture it. Let us ask the dying what their hopes are for the time they have left and for their dying process? What are the things in their life that keep hope alive? Let us cultivate the seeds of hope.
Sometimes hope can appear under the guise of denial. So often we feel the need to reorient the person to “reality”, which often rips them from the safety in which they are coping with some really hard things. This is often done with good intentions; thinking it is helping but this can be considerably damaging. Regardless of what their hopes are, whether we think they are false hope or in denial, it’s true they will still be dying (we all are by the way), but they will now be dying in a state of hopelessness, feeling alone, rejected, and abandoned. Let us always allow for hope. Acceptance cannot be thrust upon someone, but we can be a supportive presence unconditionally and be there if and when their narrative shifts, ready to listen, ready to have that conversation. Let us never rob anyone of their hope.
So how can we be true to ourselves and our own reality while aligning ourselves with our loved one who may be having hopes that are difficult for us to understand or accept? We are capable of holding two truths simultaneously. We need to shatter our OR thinking and embrace our AND thinking. Meaning, we often default to “either this OR that is true” and we want to shift to “this AND this can both be true”. We can hold hope for a miracle, a cure, a reconciliation, which all might be unlikely, while still planning for an alternative path life might take. It can sound like, “I’m really hoping for that too but in case that doesn’t happen can we talk about what this other direction might look like, and how you would want to handle it, if it does take this course”. Let us always include hope.