Hope for Lily

You got to sing like you don’t need the money, Love like you’ll never get hurt

You gotta dance like nobody’s watching; it’s got to come from the heart if you want it to work.

Kathy Matea – Come from the Heart

There is a new soul on this earth. She is born of my baby girl, a miracle of life, a testament to life always moving ever forward, a statement from God that we are still in favor.

I have hopes for this child as I have hopes for our other grandchild, Noah, as I have hopes and dreams for the grand-daughter to be who will be born in October. Hopes are what we bequeath to our children, to the next generation, hopes are what we provide to the next in line, hopes and dreams are our gifts to those we love that live their lives as ours have reached their zenith.

I hope and dream this child is able to recognize the miracle that is her life, the miracle that is life, that she is and always will be a child of something greater than herself, that she is a child of God.

I hope she lives and feels life with the passion of her grandmother and, like Marty, I hope she is able to see and feel the intensity of the colors of her world. I hope she possesses the same courage and sheer persistence of her grandmother and the knowledge that life requires us to constantly move forward.

I hope she finds a passion for her life and is able to live that passion.

I hope she learns to cry for the right reasons and at the right times, but mostly I hope she never has to cry too much. I hope she smiles a little every day of her life and that she laughs every time she can.

I hope she laughs out loud and embraces the sheer enjoyment of a moment as much as her daddy Lyle.

I hope she has the same empathy and tolerance for others as her mother, Erin. I hope she can cry and laugh with friends and family and wrap her arms around them with the same compassion and intensity as her mom.

I hope she has the love of family and the loyalty of her Grandma Eileen and the happiness and frivolity of Grandpa Larry.

I wish her the health and verve of her great-grands and I hope she gets to know how special their love for her is.

I hope she grows to know and understand that all of the women in her life, her mother, her grandmothers, her aunts and her greats-- are all remarkable, brave and strong, and that’s a really good thing and that she can be and do anything she can conceive.

I hope she finds someone to love and someone who loves her intensely. I hope she lives long enough to enjoy the singular joy in loving others and being loved by many.

I hope she has a wonderful, long, healthy life filled with hopes and dreams and that some of those hopes and dreams come true. I hope I get to dance at her wedding and hold her children and hope and dream for them as they are born.

Mostly I hope she finds a way to enjoy her life completely and that she gets to “dance like nobody’s watching” her whole life.

The Naivety of Hope

Hope is one of those integral pieces of humanity that drives us forward. Our hopes, our aspirations help make this an amazing country; I believe it’s what has pushed our country to greatness. Our country’s success, wealth and power have less to do with capitalism, democracy, personal freedom, or wealth of natural resources than the simple act of hope. It’s all about a wealth of national hope and optimism, hope is the driving force to our success.

Now, I base none of these brilliant assertions on research, facts or statistics, why bother with facts when we are talking about dreams. Why else would salt of the earth blue collar workers worry about spreading wealth when they don’t have wealth? Why would someone who doesn’t own a business, like Joe “the I’m not really a plumber but I can dream can’t I” Whizbutt , object to a higher tax for people netting a million dollars a year? Because they hope, we hope, we dream that some day that rich person will be us and we are already protecting our perceived wealth, or at least the potential for that wealth. Hope doesn’t have to be realistic to be powerful.

Hope for a better life brought the early settlers to this country, hope drove people west, hope gave rise to a new experiment in democratic government and hope brought the country through the dark times of a civil war, a depression, and multiple world conflicts. Hope pushes us to new worlds and the stars and sometimes to decisions that are really counter to our own best interests.

Hope of riches brought us a mass produced car, hope of discovery brought us the stars, and hope of a new intellectual frontier brought us the information age. Without hope in the dynamics of this country would there be a Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett or George Soros? I believe it was the undying hope and optimism in our freedom of creation that brought our country innovation and wealth beyond compare.

Hope is what keeps critical illness from taking over your mind. Hope helped us moved AIDS from a death sentence, hope keeps the parents of the child with cystic fibrosis pounding on their child’s back to help them fill their lungs, hope keeps the cancer patient going back to chemo even though it makes them deathly ill. Hope is real miracle of any medicine.

I understand hope, even unreasonable naïve hope. I’ve had it, I have it, I hope to always live with it. Hope drove me through the dark days of the ICU, our unknown future and multiple trips to rehab, hope of better days kept me sane; hope of progress against the insurmountable kept me from giving up on recovery. Hope for Marty and I means accepting a new life.

I suppose all of this hopey stuff makes me a little naïve, but that’s just fine with me. I have tried it the other way, I have tried to be cynical, I have tried to be suspicious of everyone’s intentions, I have tried to find the failure in ideas, it just doesn’t work for me, it’s now who I am. I would rather be a little naïve, a little abused by life and people than to lose my optimism, my hope, my aspirations.

I’m not sure where we heard it but when Marty was in rehab from the second stroke her mantra became, “I’m better today than I was yesterday and I’ll be better tomorrow than I am today.” A simple call to hope, a simple declaration of moving forward, those words are still repeated from time to time in our house and they still hold true even these many years after her last stroke. It’s our constant hope.