days of sorrow and optimism

Days of sorrow and optimism

I feel as if I have spent the last 24 hours balancing the world between the mundane normality of everyday life and a veil of sadness and tears that threatens to engulf me.
I’ve prone to over empathizing and that’s much of what maligns me – two friends have lost people very close to them this week and a relative has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. It saddens my heart to think of them suffering, don’t get me wrong I’ve not taken to my bed in despair but tears are never far away and can spring with unapparent prompting.
But out of all sadness there’s a glimmer of hope – an online friend with much more reason to despair than I, managed has usual to raise my optimism through my tears, he’s a profound man with unbelievable talent and time for others.
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FROM PATRICK THE OPTIMIST
This week was going really well… I had just finished my new invention, Splint Glove 2, and was really pleased with it. My research was going really well, a couple of side projects coming along nicely. Ammar’s portrait was finished, and my MND hadn’t pulled any nasty tricks on me for over a week. Then I heard that my friend Ray had died.
I knew Ray from my local MND group. He had bulbar MND and couldn’t talk, but he had a wicked, irreverent sense of humour, and I really liked him. My MND group meets every couple of months, and each time there are maybe four or five people there with MND.
I am very lucky to have an unusually slow progression rate, but most people are not so lucky. I see the newly diagnosed people walk in, and I talk to them, befriend them, and help them where I can. I then watch them deteriorate over the following months, get worse and worse, and then die. Every time, there is left in the wake of that death, a trail of broken and wounded people – family, friends, loved ones. Wounds that will not heal.
Ray is the fifth friend of mine who has died of MND, in the short time I have been a member of my local group.
And then, the next day, Kathy’s mum died.
What hope of light is there in this darkness?
My only comfort is this. As I sit there cold in my wheelchair at the funeral, my breath in clouds before me, amongst a black clad group of Kath’s family, stood sombre in the snow, there are brilliant scientists in warm laboratories across the world working hard to beat not only MND, but Alzheimer’s too – the disease Kathy’s mum had. Over the vast landscape of Arizona, someone jumps from a plane, skydiving to raise money for research. As the parachute opens, a man in Paris staggers to a halt, smiling, gasping, his marathon run – more euro’s for the cause. And as the runner drinks from his bottle, my neurologist in Oxford hits someone’s knee with a little rubber hammer, measuring, caring, helping. He looks up at his patient and smiles, and at the same moment, in the frozen churchyard in Somerset Kathy looks down at me with tears in her eyes. I squeeze her hand with what little grip I have. Today I am caring for Kathy, but normally she cares for me, and she is the most thoughtful, caring person in the world.
There is much that is bleak here, but there is much that is good also. There are people out there fighting to stop MND and there are people caring for those that have it. The system is not perfect, but we have made a start, and I take comfort in that.
I am a lucky man.
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And so for whatever wearies your spirit today, know that these things too will pass. There are always blessings to be found.