When hope disappears, where do you look next? In music, memory and the mundane

I read somewhere that April is the month of reset. It’s meant to be the month where you take stock of the past four months, refresh your perspective and start working on the little plot holes—whatever had gone wrong, and evaluate if you can fix it. You can look at May and hopefully the rest of the year, with a renewed sense of perspective.

Yet April, to quote a friend of mine, felt like being a root canal without anaesthesia. It seems to be the general consensus for so many. Sometimes, lives quietly overturned in one day without no fair warning—though to be honest, even if warnings do come, we’re never really prepared for something, are we?

Others experienced grief of different kinds—loss of familiarity, loss of a sense of self, and the struggle to gain perspective of life, and purpose.

However, many of them found hope, elusive as it is. But how do you really find it? Is it as easy as finding something that has fallen behind your bed—like a stray rubber band or a trinket? Where is it really?

But, somehow you just do. Even a little fragment of it, makes you dread the next day less. And that’s where the stories begin, of people slowly wading their way through grief of all kinds, holding on to just that little flame of hope.

For instance, I watched a friend of mine do the very same, even though her entire life was uprooted, and she would have to leave the place that she spent decades in. She never wasted time complaining, though I saw through quiet sighs in the laughter. She just kept looking for hope within the notes of music, while trying to rebuild a world for herself in all the grief. She didn’t hide from the enormity from her decisions, neither did she need to ‘embrace it’ fully, she just continued her daily routines as much as she could, because sometimes, that’s all you can do. If I ask her the question she just says, “Ah, well, hope plays hide-and-seek sometimes.” 

And so, there are stories, within stories.

‘I won’t romanticise hope’

For Abhilasha Sen, (name changed on request), a Dubai-based homemaker and single mum of two, hope isn’t some pretty, starstruck concept filled with magical dust. “I keep reading this quote, hope is blood-knuckled and bruise-kneed, and that’s what it takes to hold on,” she says.

As Sen narrates, her life has always been chaotic, ridden with uncertainty. At the age of 12, her parents announced that they were separating. And so began a long custody of who would get her. Her mother won, long story short. Sen wasn’t completely happy with the choice, because her mother was too absorbed in the sadness of her life. A heavy atmosphere weighed on Sen, till she got married, and separated last year. And this April, she spent in and out of hospital, as her son was unwell.

“All my life, I’ve vented, whined, complained, hated. I don’t think that I looked for hope as much as I looked for it now, because I thought that I might lose him,” she explains. So, she resorted to the small things—little things—like stationery, which had been a source of much joy in childhood. “Everyday in hospital, I would just spend colouring, drawing, sketching. It kept me alive, and I felt more faith in the fact that my son would recover,” she says.

A little colour steeled her belief, that her life would not fall to pieces again. “I held on to that firmly, colouring, praying everyday, quietly, just believing that he would be alright and with me. And, he did. It was as if finding strength in the strangest and most mundane of activities, centred me enough to believe again,” she says.

Her son is home now, even if he is on bedrest. But he colours with her, when he can, making whatever he can, too. Together, mum and son, sit together and spend a couple of minutes colouring.  

Listening to the past

Dubai-based trauma specialist Dahlia always turns to old childhood reads, whenever she struggles to deal with the world. “Reading my favourites, even if it’s just for a few lines, gives me some strength. Or maybe not even childhood, just generally books. I love reading Frederik Backman’s books, all of them, because there’s just so much bittersweet lyricism, and yet, it fills me with energy,” she says. She prefers hope to be buried between the lines, rather than direct cliches. “I hate it when people keep using tunnel metaphors, or anything to do with light. It’s too obvious and clear, and feels false,” she laughs. 

It has been a painful month, for Dahlia, as she lost her dog to a tumour. She is still grieving the loss of familiarity, that suddenly gets ripped out of our lives without warning. “April is always a difficult month. It’s the month when my mother died several years ago, and I almost died two years ago, and now this. I have been so unsteady on my feet this month, that I took time off,” she says.

So what does she do for comfort, apart from reading? “I listen to my mother’s songs that she had once recorded. It calms me down instantly. It’s where I find everything that I’ve lost,” she says.

Nevertheless, she admits, that it is incredibly difficult to keep looking for ray of sunshine in all the mess and chaos. “The process of grieving, finding hope isn’t ever linear; you take a few steps forward and you take several back. It will sting, scorch and hurt you sometimes, and maybe all at once. And in that moment, if you feel that you want to just take a break and not keep trying to find positivity in everything or look for something comforting, that’s okay too,” she says. Let the moment wash over you—you are allowed to feel a little sorry for yourself, and then you slowly need to pull yourself out, little by little. 

One thing, she says: Don’t go by some fixed timelines, of just waiting to feel better about everything again. “It is painfully difficult to find hope especially when it’s none. It gets exhausting. So let the process take as long as it can, and it’s important to realise that there are some griefs that are so deeply melded into us, that they will be with us lifelong.”

After all, the grief doesn’t become smaller. You just slowly grow around it, as you slowly rebuild hope. And while hope can seem dangerous for most—almost like an illusion—it doesn’t have to be. It’s in the little things that you find, that give you a semblance of peace. 

And over time, you just find more bits and pieces of it. Maybe, pieces of peace. 

And then, maybe, you have just a little strength to try again. But just like my friend says—hope plays hide and seek. Sometimes, it’s just behind the curtain, waiting to be found.

We see the shadows. 

Perhaps that’s all we need.