Hope and Fear, Held Loosely

One morning the scan looks a little better, or a doctor uses a hopeful word, and the whole mind leans forward into living: plans, appointments, the garden next spring. The next afternoon the pain is worse, or you catch a look on someone’s face, and the whole mind falls back into dying: farewells, the will, the list of what will be left undone. Hope, then fear, all day, every day. It wears a person down faster than the illness.

The swing is built on a misunderstanding. We treat hoping to live and preparing to die as two sides in an argument, as if we had to pick one. To prepare for death feels like giving up on life. To hope for life feels like refusing to face death. So we lurch between them, disloyal to whichever one we are not holding.

They are not opposites. They are two honest responses to one honest situation: you do not know. The doctors do not know. Nobody knows the day. That is true of every person alive, and it has simply become visible in your case. A person can take every treatment offered and also give away the things they no longer need. A person can plant the garden and also write the letters. There is no contradiction, only a mind that keeps insisting on a verdict.

An old prayer goes through the pairs that life swings between, and after each one says, in effect, either is fine:

This brief life, like a dream:
whether it turns out happy or turns out sad, either is fine.

— from an old prayer

Not that happiness and sadness are the same. That awareness, the thing you actually are, is not diminished by either outcome. If you get more time, awareness will be there for it. If you do not, awareness will be there for that. The swing only exhausts the part of you that thinks it has to secure a result. The part of you that is simply aware does not swing. It is already at rest in the not-knowing.

Hope will still come, and fear will still come. They are the mind doing its job. Hold them the way you hold a bird, firmly enough that it does not fly off before you have looked at it, loosely enough that you are not crushing it. When the hopeful thought comes, let it be there without building a future on it. When the fearful thought comes, let it be there without building a grave with it.

Talking with the people around you

The swing is hardest in conversation, because the people who love you are swinging too, often in the opposite direction on any given day. You feel ready to talk about dying and they want to talk about the next treatment.

With doctors, you are allowed to ask for both at once. “I want to understand every option that might help me live, and I also want to know honestly what you think is likely, so that I can prepare.” Most doctors are relieved to be asked that way. It frees them from guessing which half of the truth you can bear.

With family, you can name the swing out loud. “I go back and forth, and I think you do too, and we do not have to be on the same side of it at the same time.”

And you can stop reporting your position. Nobody needs a daily bulletin on whether you are hoping or preparing today. Take the medicine. Give away the coat. Plant the bulbs. Write the letter. When the mind stops demanding a verdict, a great deal of energy comes back to you, and it goes into the day you actually have, the person actually in the room, the breath actually being breathed.