JOAN’S BLOG – MONDAY, JUNE 16, 2008 – DESPAIR AND HOPE

There have been countless times that you have written me to say that my Blogs echo your emotions. Although the idea behind this website was that there HAVE to be spouses out there who feel the same as I, it still astonishes me at how alike we are, even with all of our life experience differences.  So once again, when our resident poet wrote to tell me that she felt despair in my recent writings, and sent me a poem she had written 4 years ago, it was staggering to read my words and emotions in her poetry. Remember – this poem was written FOUR years ago, yet if you read the message board post by rglennon of just 2 months ago, you will see the words from the poem. (Men can easily substitute the word “wife” for “husband”. The sentiment is the same.) I share with you Joyce’s poem on despair, and my musings on hope.

                                                   Despair

Dark despair surrounds me,
I cry out to the silence in the house,
I want my husband, I want my husband.

Not this stranger inhabiting his body
Who cannot converse with me.
I want the lover who is my best friend.

My cry echoes through the house
No reply , no reply.
Is God hearing my agonizing request?

Does he fathom the depth of my pain?
Does anyone?

They pat my shoulder and say,
“Hang in there”, “take care of yourself”
and I wonder, “how does one do that?”

They cannot take this unbearable burden
From me.
So I try to live on the surface of life
Trying to blot out the reality of our fate
And in the aloneness of my home
Cry out, “I want my husband, I want my husband!

Copyright 2004  Joyce Yates 

When I started this website last July, I did not know Joyce existed, yet if you read my Welcome Blog, our words are the same. Yes, I have felt overwhelming despair at what this disease has done to my husband, our relationship, and to me personally. All of my emotions and struggles have been laid bare for public consumption in my Blogs. It is only your support and encouragement that has allowed me to relinquish so much of my privacy.

But in the midst of all this despair, I do find a glimmer of hope. As we go through this journey, so many of us have become stronger, more self-reliant, more resilient, more educated. Many of us have taken a path of public advocacy that we never would have foreseen. However reluctantly, we have changed, grown, developed, and as we’ve lost the spouse we knew, we have learned to find the joy in the smallest experiences with the spouse we now have– a smile; a gesture; a quiet moment.

Yes, despair surrounds us; it will consume us if we do not follow the path of hope – the hope that we can take the lessons this journey has taught us and carve a new, different life for ourselves. We really have no choice.

MESSAGE BOARD TOPIC: Despair and Hope     

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