Excerpt from Chapter One: The Hope

What exactly is HOPE?

Sofia died of an overdose. It was devastating news that came the day before I planned to discard client notes from more then ten years ago. My notes on Sofia were among the pending discards, and sat in a container, ready to be taken to the shredder. When I got the news, I retrieved them. Sofia and I worked together during her teen-age years, and as I combed through my notes, I noticed that an overwhelming sense of darkness seemed to follow her.

Sofia was also full of life. She loved quotes and accumulating them. For a time she and I sat side by side discovering reams of quotations on the computer, at a time when our own words were just not enough. She painted some of the quotes on her bedroom walls. Her sister, Emma, told me they are still there. One day we wrote poems as we sat together. I remembered that she decided not to share hers with me, but there, in her file were my words for her. They expressed a sense of foreboding. I do not recall that being my usual state of mind when with her. The poem was, like her life, unfinished. Despite my own doubts that I was helping Sofia, I persisted.

After Sofia’s death Emma sent me a photo of a drawing I had given her sister (Figure 1.6). Emma included this touching note, “When I was going through her things, I found some artwork you made her. It looks like she was taking it with her from place to place.”

Sofia had been incarcerated numerous times over the years. Most of the time she would ask her sister to let me know. I sent her “hopeful” notes on handmade art cards. Once she asked me to help her with a project of copying and sending photographs of her life, her family, her daughter and friends, that she wanted to give as a gift to two of her friends. I had not been Sofia’s therapist for many years but always felt connected to her and obviously she felt that way toward me. It is interesting that she never contacted me when she was using, but only when her self-destructive habits were called to a halt by outside forces.

In Sofia’s life, I find the essence of hope. True hope is not praying for a desired outcome, although prayer itself is not a useless action. Hope is not filled with pleasant or frilly thoughts of reaching some glorified end result. It is not even seeing the best in someone else or even optimism. In this instance, an optimistic view would be Sofia, rising above the horrible abuse she encountered from her early childhood, to become a world renown writer. Some would say that is the epitome of ‘hopeful’ thinking. I always saw potential in Sofia, as did her adopted family. Essentially though, it was up to Sofia herself to act within the context of her life, as it is for each of us. I don’t know that she ever gave up, but I do know that she made a decision to use and that decision ended her life.

In my understanding hope boils down to something akin to persistence. Just months after my father’s death, I sat with my mother in her bedroom. As cancer ravaged her body, she was a fraction of her physical self, but she insisted on walking my sister down the aisle. Despite her obvious and enormous pain, she wore the beautiful dress we had purchased for her. The shoes had to be returned for a smaller size. She shared with me the pain she was in, as she could barely stand on her feet. She knew that she was dying. We had already bluntly discussed her involvement with hospice when the time was right.

The day of my sister’s wedding came, and she persisted. Weeks before her death, she did walk down the aisle with my sister, glowing the whole day, staying for the entire affair. I knew how much pain she was in and everyone could see her significant weight loss, but no one had any idea how much she was suffering.

What was her hope? She was not so naive to think her cancer would be cured. She had just experienced my father’s death. Death was not foreign to her. She had buried her own parents, a sister and a brother, and many other relatives over the years. I know she knew her end was in sight, and yet she persisted, playing her role as “mother” until the very end of her life.

I don’t see hope necessarily as trust or self-confidence. I think hope is a central component of the human psyche. It is aligned more closely with a sense of self preservation. I think it exists in the most depraved. It exists in inmates on death row who had committed horrendous crimes. It exists in children abducted from their homes and in individuals sexually abused by aggressors. It exists in the most impossible places, like among the nomadic tribes in the drought-stricken regions of the Sahara Desert. I believe it existed in my mother and in Sofia up to their very last breaths.

Hope is illustrated by my own persistence to get better at tennis. I played virtually no sports in my youth as I had little faith in my aggressive abilities to win in the sports arena. Yet today I persist at tennis. I can be utterly bereft at my own paucity of athletic skills and even vow to myself that I will never again pick up a tennis racket after my personal critique of a “deplorable” performance. Yet I don’t give up. The very next day I go out and try, as if I had some form of athletic amnesia. That persistence has positive outcomes for sure. I practice, so inevitably I do get better. Some days persistence manifests in the words that go through my mind when my internal critic is attacking my game, “At least I’m getting exercise!”, a justification for the persistence of hope.

A similar scenario exists with my art practice.  Why do I keep at it when my work is rejected from a juried show, or someone views my images with a critical eye? I do hear a voice inside say, “You are wasting your time. Do something more useful.” Yet I persist and that persistence is the essence of what I see as hope. That is the human quality that I strive to discover, both in myself and in others. It can be said of such an attitude, “That’s pretty hopeful.”, and the inherent meaning in this instance is “positive”. To me hope is no more positive than getting up in the morning and washing my face. Washing the sleep out of my eyes feels right, that is why I do it. Finding hope is the same, it just feels right. There is no end result or desired outcome that can change that. If I practice every day and become a good tennis player or an even better artist, I still may not reach stardom, no matter how much I pray for it. I find and practice hope because it just feels right. I think Sofia carried that picture I gave her to remind herself that someone in the world saw her potential,  and that gave her hope and the courage to keep going.