Here I am, wondering how to go about making a hope presentation to a group of workers in palliative care, and thinking about my hope roots. It was Cheryl Nekolaichuk who invited me to make the presentation, and that, perhaps is the root of the perplexing issue. Cheryl was a hope scholar before I was, and through the years she has retained a focussed and abiding interest in hope. She has written some impressive articles about hope in palliative care, articles I frequently quote. So what could Cheryl possibly want to hear from me? What would she want me to say to her colleagues, so that, when I have left the building, they would turn to her and say, “That was certainly a good idea, Cheryl!”
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when my head is churning out possibilities while my common sense begs me to go to sleep, I find myself wishing I were the kind of person who could make a hope presentation without wondering what the audience wants to hear. It would save me hours of prep time—an efficiency in business language. And then I realize that this is simply a wish, a wouldn’t-it-be-nice pie-in-the-sky musing. It is not a hope. If it were a hope, I would eventually get around to giving it serious attention and commitment. So that while I might wish I could give hope presentations without wondering what the audience wants to hear, I don’t hope to be one and most definitely have no intention of taking large or small steps toward being one. I don’t even like those kind of presenters.
Theoretically, palliative care workers are an easy target for a hope talk. If they have any hope at all, and my experience is that they are generally a hopeful lot, they have already learned to differentiate between hope and cure. Their work begins when cure is no longer a primary objective—a wish still, but not much of a hope. Their job is not to prevent death, but rather to make it as pleasant as possible. That would be easy if everyone involved could simultaneously agree that cure is not a primary objective, and if it really were possible to use our modern technologies to make death a pleasant experience. But alas, patients, families and friends don’t always come on board with the simultaneous acceptance, and the idea that drugs make people comfortable in the presence of enormous pain is a bit of a myth. The drugs reduce the pain, but as for promoting comfort, well you just have to ask a cancer patient,”Are you comfortable?” And you’ll likely get an answer your hoping self didn’t want to hear.
I think it was Cheryl who first introduced me to the concept of the hoping self. It was back in the days when she was undertaking a thorough and comprehensive study of hope, back in the days before she worked in palliative care. The hoping self is the part of you that hopes or has hope. It may, or may not be your whole self. When we talk about fostering hope, or enhancing hope, or instilling hope, we are really talking about increasing the size and working capacity of the hoping self. My own hoping self, I have discovered over the years, is a porous and permeable thing, sensitive to its surroundings, susceptible to bouts of growth and shrinkage.
THE HOPE LADY Blog is the public face of my hoping self. On the days when I am hopeful, the blog has free reign to be about anything it chooses. But on days when my hoping self is small, out-sized by the discouraging events in the world around it, the blog becomes a disciplined embodiment of the hope work I lecture about. ”Do the hope work,” my friend and fellow hope scholar Christy Simpson once said to me at a time when my hoping self had shrunk to Lilliputian scale, ”and the hope work will work on you.” Some days THE HOPE LADY Blog is the hope work.
What, I wonder, is strengthening my hoping self these days? Well, there’s my old hero Barack, and the things I am learning while teaching the hope class, and the new stories in incubation that are getting themselves ready for storytelling. My family loves me, the amaryllis bulbs are budding and the good old orchid is about to have more blossoms than it’s ever had. There’s a book chapter in a nursing text on the meaning of hope in the dying. There are my hope buddies who take it for granted that I can speak to a group of palliative care workers without having to duck thrown tomatoes. Put all that down on paper and my hoping self seems a little more vital than I had thought.
And what is it that threatens my hoping self when I think of making this presentation? Well, quite frankly, it’s fear: fear of being boring; of being insensitive; of being irrelevant; of being condescending. It’s the fear of discussing matters of the heart with professionals trained in science.
This blog has been going for about two-and-a-half years, long enough that sometimes I think of myself as THE HOPE LADY. Other times I’m just Wendy. On the best days, the two are interchangeable. On the bad days, not so much. On this day Wendy says, “Be sure you know exactly what you intend to say at the palliative care presentation. The paper they sent you says you must have clearly defined objectives.” And I know this is true, that I should have clearly defined objectives.
Then THE HOPE LADY says,”Could it be that you are distracting yourself by worrying about objectives? The paper they sent you also instructs you to spend at least 25 percent of the time interactively, and you know they don’t actually mean what the paper says because they put you in a classroom set up theatre style, hardly a friendly environment for interaction. So, rather than setting clear objectives, why don’t you plan to listen to your audience and go with your instincts? You are speaking to a group of people with hoping selves. These hoping selves are challenged on a daily basis by the frustration of working in groups who are struggling with elusive things--the wish for a cure and the need for comfort. Think of your hope tools. A presentation that seems impossible today can be possible on Friday. This is probably one of those times when you are okay, only you don’t know it yet.”
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