wildfire.
on hopelessness.
Image via Barbara Levine / @projectbphotos
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the squire’s own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.
— Robert Graves
When L was dying (and I promise I will stop using this Substack as my personal grief diary, but today is not that day) I thought often of this Robert Graves poem. The hardest part of L’s death was what went unspoken between us all: that hope was gone, and love remained, and that love without hope is both a sacred and a sinking feeling.
What hope was gone? All kinds. The hope that L would continue her journey as a miracle patient, surviving metastatic breast cancer. The hope that there was some treatment for the complications of end stage brain cancer she was presenting with. The hope that the cognitive decline, searing pain, confusion, disorientation, slurred speech, constant sickness and a myriad of other symptoms might be reversible effects of swelling, or morphine, rather than the irreparable brain damage it really was. So impossible to buy into, that reality: that the cancer kept so long at bay was suddenly carelessly tearing through this person we were all trying to hold onto, taking what it liked with abandon. Wildfire.
