Thursday, 5 December 2024

Hope was but a timid friend -

Brandy at The Rose
The news yesterday was bleak. A junior registrar was tasked with telling us the two tumours were inoperable and nothing more could be done. He did his job professionally without emotion, with nothing in his voice or look to suggest sympathy or loss; unlike the maternity unit where a box of tissues was at hand when the news of Annie's miscarriage was given, we left dry eyed to take in the news of certain death, and walked out in silence. We stopped at The Rose in Cambridge on the way home, for drinks and a Thai meal, and let the future sink in. The barman greeted us, saying "I've only just come out of Addenbrooke's", and went into great detail about the complications of his hip replacement, requiring a second batch of cement after they'd reached the bone, and breaking the leg to lengthen it so he wouldn't walk with a tilt. I refrained from trumping his story by relating mine, by telling him I too had just come out of hospital, but they could do nothing for terminal cancer. The worst thing for us both is not the inevitability of the ending, which we have had to live with for seven years now, but the removal of hope, so ably summarised by Emily Brontë:

Hope - whose whisper would have given
Balm to all that frenzied pain -
Stretched her wings and soared to heaven;
Went- and ne'er returned again!

Many commentators seem to consider Emily's poem reflects a general loss of hope in the Victorian era. I disagree with this assessment; I believe her poetry to be deeply personal, and always to reflect Emily's own moods or beliefs, and I suggest this poem too must reflect a period when she felt deeply alone, with little to live for. Certainly it reads deeply personal to me: hope has always brought balm, but the message from the junior doctor underlines that she, hope, has finally fled, ne'er to return again! 

The registrar had explained our three options: "first, with the cancer now spread to two sites, one large and difficult to access without removing much of the lung, we do not recommend surgery. Second, we can reserve radiotherapy as an option to treat pain if they start to be troublesome or ulcerate. The third is to just leave it alone, and that is what we have to recommend in your case."

Without hope, suddenly the future has darkened, its light extinguished in a few words. The only uncertainty now is time, but that is the same position for every one of us, not knowing how long we've got. But it has changed my outlook in an instant. Yesterday, I was pontificating about world leaders, Trump and Borris; today, none of that matters. The world will roll on. Macron's government collapsing? European unity in disarray? Russia may bomb us all or cut all the undersea data links? Starmer continuing as a piss-artist? Miliband continuing to gurn his way into the Guiness Book of Records as Britain's silliest clown? All this will continue without my bemused commentary. 

Without hope, we are truly alone, and life suddenly seems very empty. Belief in God may give hope for a life to come, but it is the life here and now I have always enjoyed, and always lived with hope of more to come. Without hope, we wonder if any plans are worth making, for without hope, all is dark with nothing to illumine things to come, and we may only await external events beyond our control.


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