The Audacity of Forlorn Hopefulness

By: JANA GREENE

Oddly enough, I have had the Donner Party on my mind today. A little backstory: I tend to go down rabbit holes about the most obscure things, and that just happens to be one of my recent niche interests.

I woke up today – sick again – and felt the crush of hopelessness, and the first words I thought of were “forlorn hope” – which is what those survivors of the expedition called themselves. They had run out of hope, in their cold and starving.

Now “forlorn hope” is a people, not just a state of mind. In my suburban life cannot relate to the cold and the starving. But I can completely relate to being forlorn. I actually cracked open a dictionary to read the synonyms.

Comfortless, woebegone, helpless, pitiable.

Comfortless.

I need to start writing more. Not because anyone necessarily reads my work, but I have to give my anxieties a place to call home other than my body. It helps to write. It starves the woe, to be honest.

It has been a very difficult year so far, health-wise. If you’re new here, I am the owner of a plethora of ailments: Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, knee surgery, skin cancer surgery, among others. And add bronchitis, which I battled all damn winter long. And it’s back, the bronchitis.

So, I woke up coughing my lungs out, feeling forlornly hopeless, and by the time I left the doctor’s office, I was in tears. It’s all too much, and I don’t have the strength to fight anymore. I’m so tired. And were it not for the hopelessness about my “health,” there are plenty of other things to feel forlorn about.

We are not in a hopeless state of mind. We are becoming hopelessness. I am becoming hopelessness, when I want so badly to give up.

The world is short on hope right now.

Can’t you feel the forlornity? The sadness? I feel it in my bones, where my marrow is trying its level best to keep the malignancy from spreading.

I feel it in my heart, the how will we ever recover? I feel the despair and I know well the pain, it is my constant companion.

But we cannot be comfortless, if we comfort each other.

So let us – even in our forlorn hope – comfort one another.

Blessed be.