Hope

People have asked me at times, “So you and Eric knew he had this disease, and it was going to kill him. Why didn’t you guys quit work and spend all your money? Start smoking? Drink martinis every day from dawn until dusk?”

Valid questions when you’re going to die sooner rather than later. Eric did always advocate for the daily martini. But other than that, I think despite everything we had hope? That somehow we’d beat the odds, so better not drain the bank account.

Suckers!

Hope plagued me big time in the last nine months of Eric’s life. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it. How do I hope when there is no hope? Or does hope get modified, hammered down into a “realistic hope”? Is that even a thing? Isn’t hope inherently unrealistic? What does hope look like from Eric’s point of view? We always were synchronized in our hope before, but what about now?

These were questions that required a bong hit. Or a therapist. I chose the latter.

I’ve been thinking about hope recently because the Cubs made it into the baseball playoffs, and I’m going to the game on Wednesday. Last time I went to a playoff game was in 2003 with Eric, before the cancer came back for round one.

As I’ve mentioned before, he wore his powder-blue, ruffled tuxedo shirt and bow tie - aka his wedding outfit, obtained at a thrift store - because he hoped his special clothes would bring luck to the Cubs. They didn’t, but I cannot tell you how much I love this memory, when hope was a big, fat, silly, plentiful thing, and Eric was star of the bleachers.

While mulling all of this I ran across a post by the writer Amanda Petrusich. She referenced someone with an illness who knew time was dwindling. “I suppose time is always running out,” she says. “Death is so f*cking wild - compulsory, mysterious, fast. What a miraculous thing, just to be here together for a while.”

And it struck me: maybe that is the thing we should hope for. Not a miracle-survival from cancer, not an odds-defying World Series win, but to be here together for a while. A realistic hope.

This guy was dying to have a martini every day.

The Cubs are a longshot, but hey, you never know.