#45 Hope

Hope is like an empty swimming pool. This image came to me in a dream last night.

When I was in high school our senior class picture was taken in our school’s empty indoor swimming pool. I remember climbing in there with the rest of my class and standing on the blue and white striped surface. It was a surreal experience. Before we climbed down the ladders, fully clothed in our collared shirts and tailored pants (yes, it was private school), I remember looking at the empty expanse of pool. It looked like it was waiting.

It looked like I felt during that long flight to Las Vegas. I had spoken to the neuro-surgeon twice by the time I got on that flight. I knew the surgery that he was about to perform was not likely to change what was going to happen, but was the only chance Eric had. I also knew it might kill him. And I had to sit still for 5 hours with no communication with the outside world and no one around me knowing what I was going through.

There was a yawning chasm of emotion inside of me. There was the hope I would not allow myself to have. There was the grief I wasn’t ready to feel. There was the anger and uncertainty and confusion. There was an empty space I couldn’t fill with anything yet. Like that swimming pool.

I tried listening to music, but every song reminded me of Eric. I tried sleeping, but every time I closed my eyes I was subject to the cycle of my thoughts from despair to hope to reality. The only thing I could do was read. With supreme concentration I could transport myself from one world to another where someone I loved wasn’t dying or dead already. Every time I tried to take a break from the book, or my eyes closed involuntarily from exhaustion, I was immediately catapulted back into my hope and need; emotions I couldn’t deal with on that plane. My book was my savior. Anything to keep me from thinking. Anything to keep me from feeling that aching need, that empty space waiting for permission to exult in a miracle or collapse in unbelieving sorrow.

Katie and her mother met me at the airport and I found out that Eric had, technically, survived his surgery. It wasn’t until I saw him at the hospital, wrapped in white gauze, still as he never was in real life, that the empty space began to fill. I gently lifted his eyelids and saw his blown pupils and I knew.

Waves of grief washed over me. I called all the religious people I knew and asked them to pray, but I knew. I awaited my parent’s arrival an hour after mine and wondered how I was going to tell them. I knew. The empty space was gone but it was replaced by another. A hole where Eric used to be.