Hope truly springs eternal.  As Cicero once said: "While there is life there is hope."

When my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2003 we all struggled with the meaning and limitations of hope, given the dire prognosis.  

There were some in my family who held out for a miracle, while others felt that all we could hope for was acceptance and a "good death."  I was originally in the latter camp, but when I think back on the moment of my father's death, I realize that hope grows even in the craggy environs of the skeptic's soul.

I knew my father would die that night.  I had spent most of my days and nights over almost six months caring for him, and felt intuitively that he was at the very end.  Sunday was my "day off", which I usually spent with a young man I was seeing at the time, and before I left that afternoon I said my last goodbyes.

My father was already halfway across the river Lethe by then, and in shouting to him over the racket of labored breathing, I had a vision so real of him in a small boat disappearing in the fog, that it has never left me.  It was realer to me (and remains so) than the ravaged shell of him at whose bedside I was kneeling at the time. 

"I love you dad," I shouted.

And he echoed (literally) from across that great distance:  "I love you dad," and then poignantly corrected himself: "I love you, too, sonny."

To my knowledge, those were his last words, and then he was gone in the fog.

I was at Jason's until late.  We spent most of our time in bed holding one another in silence.  Before leaving I remember debating momentarily whether I should go or just stay the night.  I knew exactly what fate had in store for me on my return, and I wanted to cheat it for a few hours longer.

Of course I headed home, where my mother and brother had taken out a box of photographs and spread them out over the living room floor.  My father's breathing was unlike anything I had heard before.  His broken body was shutting down, clattering and clanging to a halt.  It was a horrible thing to witness.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge (a gesture my father would approve of) and sat with them for the few moments it took to down it, but this was their time with him.  I had had mine.  So I went to bed.

I hadn't slept deeply through the night for weeks.  My father, who as his illness progressed would often sleep through the day, had become increasingly restless in the night, often trying to get out of the hospital bed we had set up in the living room.  

His last stay in the hospital the nurse had found him splayed out on the floor, with cuts and bruises. He was on blood thinner to counteract the possibility of pulminary embolism, so even minor cuts could be serious.  The night watch was the worst.  

So I wasn't sleeping deeply when some time around 4 a.m. somewhere in my consciousness I registered the strange silence in the house, and then my mother rushing in to tell me, with some urgency, "I think your father's gone."

This is the moment I realized how hard it is to expunge hope from your heart.  I leapt out of bed, as if this were the moment to take decisive action.  "We'd better call hospice!" I shouted.

I got to the phone, dialed the number, and breathlessly told the nurse on duty: "my father has stopped breathing!" 

Like, what should we do? 

Her matter-of-fact reply (she would dispatch a nurse to verify the time of death) reminded me that what I had come a thousand miles and spent six months of my life to do was... done. 

The rituals of daily life — so centered around sustenance, around food, around rhythms of sleeping and waking — had somehow, though grown erratic beyond recognition — lulled me into that familiar fog of hope that gets us through, moment by moment, the days of our lives.

What should we do now?  Say goodbye, with love and awe.  Bury the dead.  Eat, drink, sleep, fuck.  Live.  Hope.  

I have kept that moment of resurgent hope — that uncontrollable sense that there must be something more to be done, after months of knowing that there was nothing to be done but comfort and care and prepare to let go, after months of rehearsing resolution and acceptance — in amongst the curios in a little lock box at the back of my consciousness ever since. 

We cannot help but hope, even at the edge of the abyss, even as we tumble into it, into oblivion. 

And sometimes the world with its absurdities and horrors reminds me again that it does no good really to lose hope — even when we want to, in the guilt of surviving our loved ones, in the irremediable anguish of loss, and the face of the evil of everyday life, hope finds us.