In The Darkness We Can Still Find Hope

Last January I began working with a woman who struggled mightily throughout our sessions, but who nevertheless continued to meet with me. After she missed our session and not hearing from her one week, I learned that she had overdosed and died. Actually? She really died from despair.

I have no idea if she “finally feels relief,” “is in a better place” or “can now be at peace.”

A lot of people say and believe those words. 

I am not comforted at all by what happens after we die. Because I would prefer to provide comfort to those in need BEFORE they die. Before there is no longer the possibility of change and the experience of hope, the most life-affirming thing we humans have.

And the only time we are not able to have that possibility of change and hope… the ONLY time… is when we die. There is no change to be had once we die.

For the record, I also do not blame her death on drugs. I blame it on the life she was given as a child and where she had no voice, no power to change her environment or her family.

If you were privy to the broken pieces of her story, I’m pretty sure you would agree. It is a very familiar story in our world.

Nowhere was there relief or respite from the struggle inside her head, and she’d been raised to carry the burden of shame all alone, that was not even hers to carry.

I believe the only way she could distance herself from that burden was by using a substance.

Now though, she won’t have a chance to learn the truth that the burden wasn’t hers. And she wont be able to learn how to trust in the work we did together. That work is a much longer and more difficult process than could happen in the short time we had together. And this work is not a magic fix for anyone either. FYI, if you’ve been alive longer than 12 weeks, forget trying to find a fix/cure in a 12 week /short term resolution therapy approach (I call BS with that money-maker). We are ALL too complex for that shit.

I am definitely not a church person, and not really a God person (although to be honest, not entirely NOT a God person either). Years ago, I came across a poem during a really difficult time in my life, and I found it surprisingly moved me deeply and stayed with me. I kept a worn out piece of paper I’d written it on on my refrigerator. Tonight, as I was hiking around a place near me at sunset and mulling over her death, it came to mind again after all these years.

The poem speaks to me in its depiction of the broken world we live in, while simultaneously describing a reality where hope exists alongside despair.

While the vision the author uses in his poem is the Holy Ghost with those bright wings of hope and love, I believe it can truly be any vision we each choose that offers us hope. 

For me, finding that hope is almost always in the form of Nature.

How can something that embodies the extreme, dark, and harsh realities that is Nature also encompass the stunning beauty and the unflinching continuity of Life? It defies explanation in words.

With that coexisting reality, my vision of hope stays rooted in the very real dark paradise that is Nature. It seems so reminiscent to me of man’s inhumanity to man and the mad destruction that is War, which simultaneously exists alongside amazing acts of compassion, love, and courage. Battlefield or bedroom.

Consider how fleeting our life actually is. I realize as I get inexorably older and older, how terribly much I will miss this earth when I’m gone. And so, I do not want to miss any of it, good or bad.

Shelly Harlow

August 31, 2024

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on September 5, 2024.

Shelly Harlow is the mother of two US Army veterans. She has worked for the last 20 years in the mental health field with those who have seen and endured more than most humans should ever have to and believes firmly that we are our own most powerful healers. Her own background and history are the foundation for her work with others and for her writing. Her hard-headedness has taken her further than any degree ever has. She remains a cynical optimist whose interest in humans has never faltered, knowing how flawed and amazing we all are.

Shelly can be reached at: Calm After the Storm- Trauma Coaching by Shelly Harlow

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.