Hope

 I'm half way through the week of wearing the eye patch.  So far I've enjoyed being waited on but I've also been warned not to get too use to it.  The folks here at the Lodge have been great.  I am afraid I am putting on weight. It may be a month or more before I can run again so maybe I need to stop eating so much.

"Egregious act of evil", that is the words the local sheriff used to describe yesterday's events here in Memphis. Four siblings, the oldest only four and half years old, have been fatally stabbed to death and their mother is now in custody.  What could cause a mother to be in a state of such despair that she would take the lives of four small children?

This was not in some poor, run down intercity neighborhood.  No! It was within a gated, golf course community.  The photos on the news all give the impression that this was a middle class community: one where families would be happy and children would be safe.  Yet for some unknown reason a mother lost all hope and let evil consume her very being.

I reflect on all this sitting here in the living room of the American Cancer Society's Hope Lodge.  Because of my extended stay, awaiting the removal of the radiation platelet, I have witnessed numerous patients come and go.  Most of them here for only two or three days; but all with a common trait -- hope.

Hope. It's one of those words we so often use without thinking about what it means.  Ask the average person and they will tell you that hope equates to wish.  However, look it up in the dictionary.  There you will discover that the primary usage and definition is not a verb but a noun.  Hope is not some fanciful wish but it is the object of a desired expectation.  The object not the act!  This is not the Wishing Lodge but the Hope Lodge. Individuals come here not wishing but instead come with expectations.

The local sheriff has stated that the investigation of yesterday's events will focus on the why. So far they have found no one who can say any of this mother's actions were foreseeable.  I can not help but wonder if sometimes we are so self absorbed that we do not truly see others.  Are there people all around us, hurting, truly with no hope?  I was certainly no English scholar but one poem I remember studying in school is Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith.  The first stanza goes:

Nobody heard him, the dead man.
But, Still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.