Thought experiment: is hope a helpful thing?

This summary and contemplation are from Stephen Jenkinson’s “Die Wise.” His third chapter, The Tyrant Hope, invites us to critically examine the concept of hope, and especially hoping for More Time.

When someone is dying, hope is treated as inherently good, helpful, and necessary. If patients say they are hopeful, we take this is a positive sign. But let’s examine the content vs. function of hope. For most dying people, the primary hope is for More Time. That’s the content of hope, but what’s the function of hope? What does hoping for More Time do for us that is beneficial? The below thought experiment, adapted from “Die Wise,” illustrates the content of hope (More Time), but questions the function – is hoping for More Time a sensible thing to do, and does it serve a clear purpose?

Imagine you’ve just been given a prognosis of 3-9 months to live.

You arrive home, reeling. You spent the entire car ride thinking about More Time, consumed by your desire to have More Time.  

You pick up your calendar.

Do you flip to the date 3 months from now? Does More Time begin then? Is it clever to aim for 3 months so that your More Time can start sooner? 

Or do you set your goal at 9 months, so you have more time to hope for your More Time to begin? 

What about surpassing those goal posts? One week past the day you were supposed to die? Two weeks past the day you were supposed to die? Do those days feel different than today? How? 

What if your More Time has already started? After all, most of us are already living in the future we hoped for in the past.  

What if you’re in the middle of your More Time… and it feels exactly like this?

Now, finally, it becomes prudent to ask: what will you do with your More Time? Will you spend your More Time differently than your Right Now? Is More Time when hoping stops and when dying starts?

Is More Time when living starts?

Or can More Time only ever be spent hoping for More Time?

For Jenkinson, hope is not its own reward, and our hope for More Time owes us more than More Hope. So we return to the question: what does the act of hoping do for us that is beneficial?

When hopeful people are dying, and when dying people are hopeful, they buy a house on a street called Not Now, in a town called Not Yet. 

As long as you are hopeful, you are never in the land you hope for. If you bargain for More Time, you never live in the land of More Time. No one seems to hope for what they have, and hopeful dying people rarely get the More Time they hope for, no matter how much More Time they get.

The crux here is that hoping for More Time means that More Time never comes. The act of hoping is then not even net neutral, it’s negative. Hoping is prohibitive to our ever achieving what we hope for. Hoping is looking toward the future while simply tolerating the present, never appreciating that the present is the tomorrow we hoped for yesterday.

In a death-phobic culture, dying is never a credible outcome. Because death is unacceptable, the More Time we purchase will never live up to our collective expectations. In a death-phobic culture, dying is far less attractive than hoping you aren’t dying. And so, the bargain for More Time is mostly a gamble for More Life. But what you get is not a resumption of the life you’ve always known, what you get is more time to die in. More time to live the end of your life in the distinct, ample, palpable presence of your death, as Livingston says. And that, in our culture, is totally foreign, and it’s why the More Time we hope for doesn’t satisfy. We don’t get More Life, we get More Death – and most of us don’t think much about how to live More Death.

Jenkinson says our patented end-of-life strategy is Cope. Hope. Dope. Hope is always a given, and the role it plays in dying largely goes unquestioned. Jenkinson’s recommendation he admits is a revolution, and that’s to live and die hope-free. We believe dying is giving up, and hope is refusing to give up. We create a false choice – you are either hopeful, embracing life, or hopeless, embracing death. But hope is not life, and it doesn’t help us die well. Hoping for More Time serves only the strategy of not dying.

Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have… Hope almost always makes sure that it is too late to learn how to die for dying people in a death-phobic culture. That is what it does to them. Turning away from learning how to die well in the name of being hopeful.

Note: Italics have been used for emphasis and to identify quotes from Jenkinson in his book “Die Wise.”

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