The Shell Game of Hope

“She’s gone.”

My mother’s voice over the phone had a tone to it that I’ve never heard before. I’m sitting on the side of a bed inside a hotel room in Dubai. I’ve just checked in. My bags haven’t even been delivered to my room.

“Are you sure?” I hear my words floating in the ether but they don’t seem to have come out of my own mouth. My mother has just delivered the heart-wrenching news that my younger sister — my only sibling — has taken her own life.

“Are you sure?” — There it is. The sound of me engaging hope, clinging to it with every fibre of my being.

I cancel my appointments and come straight home. I wasn’t aware of the details around my sister’s death, but in some sense that was good, as it left room for more hopeful scenarios to play out in my head. It was my only defence against the immense darkness rising up inside me like a tide.

I arrived on my mother’s doorstep and she fell into my arms. The expression on her face told me immediately that all hope was gone.

Two years on, and I am sitting up in bed, with my mother’s limp body propped up against my chest. I am brushing her hair and whispering in her ear. It turns out that my mum had decided she’d seen enough of late stage bone cancer and had taken matters into her own hands — with the same concoction of pills that my sister had used. She died shortly afterwards.

Was it wrong for my mother to give up hope? Or did she accept the reality of her dire situation and choose to go peacefully, in her own home, in her own way.

Shortly afterwards, I was diagnosed with a chronic, progressive blood cancer. Suddenly, I was not just grieving the loss of my mother and sister, but staring at my own mortality in the face.

Less than a week later, I simply sat down in the middle of a busy street, unable to take one more step. Luckily for me, a psychiatric ward was nearby and had a spare bed.

That was my Ground Zero. Much has changed for me since then, but in essence, this is why I believe it’s important to talk about the other side of hope.

We will always turn to hope. It’s part of the human condition. But I think that understanding the right kind of hope is vital, because I’ve seen that it can be highly irrational when it comes to chronic illness, death and dying.

We’re all going to die, although many of us play out our lives as if that wasn’t the case. Therefore, when it approaches, we turn in vain to hope. We attempt to solve the supposed ‘problem’ of death with hope.

I doubt anyone reading this is hoping the sun will rise tomorrow. We don’t hope for it because it doesn’t occur to us that it may not. When we’re well, we don’t usually spend much time hoping that we will live until tomorrow, we just assume we will. But when we are faced with a life-threatening situation, a chronic illness for example, we suddenly turn to hope. Why? Hope becomes a shield against fear.

When we face a challenge, if we base our lives, or more accurately our mode of living, on hope, it’s a poor strategy. It will — in every instance — fail because we are mortal. So if the closer we get to the end of our lives, the more fearful we become and the tighter we cling to hope as an antidote, then what? We begin to make poor decisions. We take options that have less and less chance of success, and we attach larger and larger degrees of hope to their outcome.

In a medical scenario, for example, it’s all-too-often that people are eventually told more chemotherapy will lessen their chance of survival, that they have passed the tipping point. A large proportion demand it anyway, as stopping involves a giving up of hope, and that’s just not an option. It would involve confronting reality. In such situations, they might be asked to embrace a ‘more realistic hope’. Just think about that phrase for a moment. It’s farcical.

This is what Stephen Jenkinson — author of ‘Die Wise’ — calls the shell game of hope: “That we are driven by dread toward hope, hoping that the hoped-for thing is inherently good for us, and the dreaded thing is inherently not.”

Hope then causes additional suffering, in the belief that we are showing weakness by giving up when things are reaching a natural and inevitable conclusion. Jenkinson calls hope pernicious, in that it often makes dying people incapable of dying well.

As a meditation teacher, I’m all about staying in the present moment. In the context of mindfulness, hope raises another conundrum. Hope is by definition projecting our thinking into the future and wishing for a certain outcome. Living in constant hope can rob us of the present and of fully utilising the only time we have — now.

When that hoped-for thing eventuates — if it does — rather than become present and enjoy it, we just hope for the next thing. Thus, a dying person — and we are all that — hopes for more life and if they get it, spends it hoping for yet more life again, never really living.

The most interesting thing is that the object of all their hope is something they already have right now. Life. In focusing our energy on a hoped-for future, we can miss what’s right in front of us. What’s most important.

As I stated earlier, hope is vital, but what we need is a courageous, heartfelt kind of hope. A hope that encompasses every aspect of our lives, including death. A hope that isn’t a shield against what’s uncomfortable, painful and fearful, but a pathway to understanding and an acceptance of what is.

This, to me, is better defined as active hopefulness. Something that allows for self-compassion, for empathy, for connection, for awe and wonder, even in the toughest of times. Something that allows us to live fully in the present moment.

It sounds a lot like love, don’t you think?