Hope

What is hope in the face of grave illness? Is it simply trying to prolong life? Say you can minimize all the external risks and be quarantined in a personal space, and you think you might get an extra year. Does that fuel yours or your caretakers’ hope? Sure, some scientific breakthrough might come along in the future, and that might save you.

But when the odds are heavily stacked against you to have one more year, no matter what risks you minimize, is that the best way to hold on to hope.
For example, when it’s 90% you have a few months left and 10% you have a year left, what do you do?

With odds like that, you can’t just focus on getting through the year, while putting all types of restrictions on yourself. Sure, you should keep hoping that you can beat the 10% odds. But you gotta also focus on the 90%, which is something that is much more likely to happen.

And what is hope when your remaining time is about 2-3 months? It’s silly to hope that you survive the whole 3 months. It’s not a milestone you need to achieve. In a timeframe so small, 2 or 3 months might not be that different.

Hope, then, can simply be that you have and can do something that matters to you. If certain foods bring you joy, why not go eat it, even if there’s a small risk you’ll catch something. If bungee jumping is something you’ve dreamed of doing, but your body is too weak from your illness, why not pick a right time you’re healthy enough and go for it? In the face of 2-3 months (heck, even one year), you should hope that you’re able to do things that bring you joy and meaning to your life. When nothing matters and you just want the end to come, that’s when you’re hopeless.

So does the absolute amount of time even matter in this case? If you can live for 2 months or 3 months, but have the same number of joyful experiences, does the actual duration of your life matter? Time, then, gets measured by the number of moments, however cheesy that sounds (it might have also come from some movie).

Coming back to the scenario of surviving a year. Simply trying to make it through the year, maybe you get to a point where a new cancer discovery saves you. Or maybe you just live for a year in a prison, being safe and getting zero infections by minimizing all sorts of risks that can cause you trouble. Then you go. You did hold on to hope, but was it false hope? How is it different from giving up on hope and waiting for the end to come? In the end, isn’t it just denial?