All is not lost

You know how it is when you are watching a good movie – one of those movies that really sucks you in, with characters you can identify with, or at the very least grow attached to because they are good people, real people, people you want to be happy and have good lives with everything working out great for them in the end. If something happens to one of these characters you hope beyond hope that somehow, some way, it will all work out ok in the end, that they will survive, persevere, and overcome everything that ails them. You feel it so strongly, that if the movie takes a turn for the worse, if something bad happens, it is as if it has happened to someone you love and care about. It is crushing, horrible defeat – and with every movie like that there is the same hope, the same strength, the same unbeatable will growing inside you to help the character survive. The same thing happens with novels too, although more often than not the spirit gets defeated in ways you can’t even imagine, but you live and breathe hope through this character until the final outcome, whatever that may be.

In this wide world connected so intangibly by the internet, we meet people, we know people, but these are people we only see on the screen, like a movie or a book. You read their thoughts and feelings every day on blogs and through their websites, and it is a weird connection – you feel attached in an odd way – they’ve become a sort of extended family, even though technically speaking you don’t know them. Yet when something happens to them, whether they are trying to get a new job, or buying a house, or having a baby, or become seriously ill – you feel that connection even stronger – you want them to succeed, to get what they want, to be healthy and happy and strong.

In the last few days a fellow blogger has become seriously ill, deathly ill, and through the pained and beautiful posts of her husband we are kept aware of how she is doing, how he is doing, how a man faces the potential loss of the woman he loves. And it is devastating. And I feel that old familiar feeling, that hope beyond hope, that if anything can happen in life, can we just somehow make sure she comes out of this ok, so she can continue being a friend, a daughter, a wife, a mother - a human being who walks this earth, full of life and hope and even sadness and regret, because everything we experience includes all the good and the bad, and just to be alive is to be grateful for both.

This post is dedicated to the struggle for life that is going on at this moment halfway around the world from me, in a hospital in East Tennessee. For GAC, for her husband AT, and for her family, I pray for her recovery.