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Hope |
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Written by TCF (Pat O'Donnell.)
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Saturday, 31 December 2005 |
Hope by Pat O'Donnell
Food for thought as a topic at our next meeting as Hope springs eternal.
Perhaps one quality that we need but find so elusive to attain is Hope. Hope that the future will somehow get better, brighter, or even tolerable. Hope that time will be kind and cure this heartache or at least make it manageable, bearable. How can we have hope when our children are no longer with us the way we would like them to be?
So here Janet and I are at our first meeting of The Compassionate Friends after our son Brian's fatal accident and people are talking or laughing or just being normal. It would seem to be impossible to contemplate laughter when breathing is a chore. I remember thinking I must be in the wrong place. There is no way these folks could have lost a son or a daughter. They are much too happy. I was so hopelessly uncomfortable. Our world was upside down. There was no gravity. Air was sparse. Food was barely a necessity. Sleep, though sporadic, was usually a relieving savior if only for brief periods. One of the great accomplishments of the last two months had been driving to and finding this meeting place called The Compassionate Friends. Just getting out of the car was a monumental task. Walking the 75 or so footsteps to the entrance of St. Timothy's took a lifetime. I remember strangers everywhere. I remember being asked some questions that sounded like a foreign language. I could not comprehend the words. Speaking English for nearly 50 years was not enough to grasp what was being asked of me. Are you new? Is this your first time here? Did you lose your child recently? I knew this could not be happening to me and at any second I would wake up from this bizarre nightmare of insanity. The fog would lift and life would be the way it was. The way it was suppose to be. We would sit and talk about our children, how could this be possible? Conversation with another was at best a useless struggle when communication had lost its value. I felt resentment at their disrespectful normalcy. Didn't they know I had just lost my son? How dare they pretend to enjoy themselves? They must be friends of someone who has lost a child. They can't possibly be bereaved parents! The urge to leave was strong. But where were we to go? There was nowhere. There was only before Brian died and after Brian died. The where was always irrelevant and often nonexistent.
We stayed. We came back for the three meetings suggested by the experienced Moms and Dads. Not three meetings in a row but over the next six or seven months we made it to at least three. At the meetings we could feel, hear and see our desperation reflected in the faces of other Moms and Dads. The death that was caused by illness, accident, murder, suicide, drowning, drugs, to the infant of a few days, to the son in his 50's, the precious ten year old, the teenager not yet graduated, the youthful in the beginning of their lives, the specifics were quite varied but the outcomes identical. When all was said and done the cause or the age didn't matter to the hopeless. We were broken adults that were united by the loss of our children.
We grew to miss the meetings when we didn't attend them and wondered how the other new folks were getting along. We cared for them. It seemed like we had not cared for anyone or anything for so long. In retrospect this may have been one of our first steps in healing. We cared for someone we didn't know. We grew to appreciate the help of strangers who had become our friends. We were interested in how they were doing. We knew that our situation was sadly familiar to them. Our despair slowly turned to hope in the future as we compared our state of mind at that very first meeting to that of our most recent. The healing progress had been subtle but upon closer examination it was definitely present. It may not seem like much at the time you are drifting aimlessly through this valley of tears but we learned that if you keep moving through the setbacks those tears on your face will turn to raindrops from above and the light at the end of the tunnel will not be another train! We had finally found some Hope and you will too.
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