by Charlene Iannella

Created on: September 16, 2009

I was driving on a highway to the hospital to see someone who was no longer there. I was driving with blinding tears in my eyes as usual, tears that would continually dissipate with deep breaths and thoughts of my son, only to come back in crushing waves again as I thought of all that was forever lost. But then I saw something on the back of someone's car. It was just a bumper sticker but it caught me like a butterfly net and held me in the air, questioning me gently but firmly, "Got hope?"

Now I know that my time of grief happened at the same time that Barack Obama had come up with a particularly catchy phrase and put it on supporters' bumpers everywhere. But at the time, everyday, I would randomly see this sticker on the back of cars, I would look for it, and I started holding onto the words as the greatest sign of a day after the sadness. I filled myself inside with the thought, "Got hope?" Did I have hope? Didn't I want to? Didn't each of us, even in our darkest hours, still have the most infinitesimal spark of hope that carried us on, made us able to keep trying? I had it, I had it still, even with the devastating days in the wake of my husband's accident, and I have it now.

My favorite book is The Great Gatsby for its carefully interwoven hope for the future. I love the blinking green light in the distance. I love how it is a symbol of hope. I love how it sustained the characters and held their hearts. I just never expected my blinking green light to come in the form of a bumper sticker. But now I know, it doesn't matter where you find the hope to believe that life may begin again or return, it just matters that you recognize it. We all live in this cruel, beautiful place where we are suspended on a wire of luck and take for granted that it won't break and we won't fall. But when it does fray, when we feel the give, then the release of all that we thought was sacred and secure and unbreakable, we need these small symbols of what might still be more than ever. A memory of how much life can hold that will lull us back to a place where we can think about living it again. Because as much as the unexpected and unwanted beats down our spirit, time can always heal it. There is no despair too great that it can not be walked away from. It is in the worst moments that human beings realize it is our destiny to experience pain and suffering, as naturally as beauty and happiness.

I am no expert on hope. I just know that it's there. I know that Barack Obama wasn't offering the American people something that we didn't have, but something we often forget to remember. There are great lessons to be learned from the worst moments, our most raw, uncertain times of existence and it is that "we beat on, boats against the current" but we beat on. We hope on. And there, we truly live.

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