What does hope look like in the face of death?

Well, I didn't expect to be writing about grief again quite so soon.

This week, I lost my mentor and confidant, Chris Lowry, and Hope for the Future lost a wise and much loved trustee. Chris had been living— and flourishing— with a terminal cancer diagnosis for over two years, but her decline in health, in the end, was very fast.

Only a week before her death she attended a Hope for the Future zoom meeting, looking just a little more tired than usual.

It is hard to believe she is gone so quickly, but in a way I am glad, because her death was swift and without struggle, and I am told that she felt ready to go when the time came.

There's Always Another Way of Looking at Things

Alongside her trustee duties Chris offered one to one mentoring for any of the Hope for the Future staff and volunteers who wanted it— so that was most of us.

In one of my first sessions with Chris, soon after Hope for the Future was formally registered as a charity and I had officially become Director, I brought all the anxieties and fears I was holding to her. As always, Chris listened intently.

Her head, which was covered in pink hair at the time, nodded in understanding, her large, dangly earrings swinging in agreement.

'Chris, what on earth am I doing? I'm not ready for any of this.'

Chris looked at me over the top of her glasses.

'You know Jo, there's always another way of looking at things.'

Her eyes were bright with mischief but I was drawing a blank.

'Yes, you're young, you've got loads to learn. But your being inexperienced allows you to bring a different perspective to things. Think of it like this— think of it as, fresh is the new naive.'

Fresh is the new naive.

It's a phrase our Deputy Director and I often repeat to each other, mimicking Chris lilting Irish accent, when we need an extra dose of courage.

Chris was the master of looking at things from different perspectives and settling on an angle that put people right at the heart of things. She was forever cheering us on and it was one of the things I most valued about her as a trustee.

But perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from her was that there is always a way to find— or create— hope, even when faced with something as final as death.

'I can't die yet', she said shortly after her diagnosis, 'I've only just joined Hope for the Future's board. There's far too much for me to do.'

Chris saw meaning where others may have seen despair. Whether in her role as a trustee, modelling courage to our young and growing team, or in raising money for breast cancer research, or in sharing her journey with others living with cancer, Chris carved out a place for herself that made her offer to the world only more powerful because of her cancer.

She was not diminished by her diagnosis, but emboldened by it.

She was an embodiment of hope.

Hope in a Climate Crisis

Like many of us involved in the climate movement, Chris was only too aware of the existential threat that ecological breakdown poses to us.

The prospect of death and grief on a genuinely colossal scale.

To acknowledge climate change— a diagnosis that is fortunately not yet terminal— is to acknowledge our collective mortality. It is to speak of death. Of loss. Of grief.

And acknowledging that in a world that does its best to ignore and avoid those things, is an enormous challenge.

For myself, it is not easy to acknowledge the grief I feel about the secure future I thought I could depend on for myself and for any children I might bring into the world.

Nor the ache in my heart which mourns for a once gloriously abundant earth, now straining under the tyranny of human carelessness.

Nor that in spite of all that, I still struggle to let go of a lifestyle that I know is no longer sustainable, because that too is a loss.

Sometimes I hear people say something along the lines of, 'it's very simple really. We just need to cut our emissions as soon as possible.'

And that's true, we do.

But also, it isn't quite that simple because responding to the climate emergency is about so much more than that.

Responding to the climate emergency is about readjusting humanity's entire understanding of its place in the world.

It's about becoming a species that regenerates rather than extracts, meaning that we give more than we take. One that collaborates rather than competes. One that knows just how intrinsically connected we are to the natural environment, and to each other. We have a lot of readjusting to do.

And here is where we might find some meaning amidst the chaos of loss which lies on the horizon of unchecked climate change.

Because it is my understanding that meaning is where hope comes from.

Not in the absence of pain, uncertainty or suffering, but in the knowledge that we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves.

Something that transcends, perhaps even transforms, our fear, anger and grief. Something good we can give ourselves to.

Learning from the Master

I wish I had thought to ask Chris about all of this whilst she was still alive. What was her secret to living with so much hope whilst in the knowledge of her terminal diagnosis?

Did she set out to give as much to others as possible as a way of finding meaning in her diagnosis, or did that just happen naturally to her? Did she have to work hard to stay positive, and if so, what was her secret? How did she manage it when fear did creep up on her?

Since her death I have been trying to imagine what she might have said to me about the fears I have for my own future, and I've settled on something along these lines; 'Inside yourself, Jo, you will find all sorts of treasures you never even knew existed.'

And it seems that moments of great difficulty can be the moments when we can unlock more of these treasures within ourselves than usual.

Palliative care consultant, and author of 'With the End in Mind', Kathryn Mannix, writes about these untapped depths beautifully.

Mannix's book is a collection of short stories about the final weeks, days and minutes of her patients' lives. You would expect such a book to make for sombre reading, but it is instead an absolute joy, a guide to 'living and dying well.'

Sharing a story of how two breast cancer patients supported each other as they neared the ends of their lives Mannix reflects on her observation that most human beings are quite extraordinary in the final stages of their life. Our final hours are apparently quite often some of our finest.

There is, in other words, an unveiling that can happen as a person approaches death. A surrender, or giving way that can sharpen our sense of the limitlessness and beauty of life itself.

Humanity's Final Hour

That being said, it is not a pleasant thing to contemplate that after 6,000 years of human civilisation, just ten years remain to us if we are to bring a halt to catastrophic climate change. No amount of positive thinking makes that— or any untimely or angst filled death— any less terrible than it actually is.

But many, many people are still to realise just how close we are cutting this thing.

And the prospect that I find almost too unbearable to contemplate, is that by the time enough of us realise, by the time we are awakened enough to this crisis to begin seeking out those treasures within, by then it might be too late.

Just as smoking, air pollution or asbestos have been known to take their deadly effects far after the possibility of doing something about it has passed, so do we now run the risk of setting off certain natural processes globally that cannot be reversed, even if the worst of the effects are to follow a little later.

So it is up to us to unearth those untapped depths within ourselves now, the sort that we can currently only dream of.

The kind of depths that began to take shape when lockdown first began and community spirit erupted as the virus broke through the humdrum of ordinary life.

In those moments we got a small glimpse of what we are truly capable of being for each other.

Perhaps that community spirit and rising to the occasion that can happen in moments of large scale difficulty is why so many of those who lived through the World Wars look back on those times with a degree of romanticism.

The edge of death, it seems, can sometimes bring us closer to the heart of life.

Death is not the End of us

To unlock this potential in ourselves we'll need to find a means of acknowledging just how close to that edge climate change is bringing us.

We'll need to find a way to become a little more comfortable with uncomfortable conversations about mortality and fragility in a culture that hides behind a plethora of euphemisms from 'passing away' through to 'kicking the bucket', and a culture that currently largely ignores ecological breakdown.

And that is not an easy thing to do.

Just this week I was walking with a good friend, and I broached the subject of climate change. She is a friend who I respect enormously and whose gifts and talents the climate movement could truly benefit from, but the moment I brought up climate change, our deep and flowing conversation became almost immediately stilted and awkward.

In my previous post, On...The Second Peak, I offered up some suggestions as to why our fear response to climate change may render us immobolised in this way. In particular how our fight, flight or freeze responses, hardwired into our psychological DNA, can render us unable to acknowledge the path we are currently set on.

So how are we to strengthen and ultimately increase our capacity to acknowledge and work with climate fear, even as it threatens to overcome us?

Again, Chris never shied away from the path she was on. She made it clear that she was always happy to discuss both her diagnosis and the variety of treatments she went through.

'The last thing I would want would be for this to become 'the big C' that no one can talk about,' she had written in one of her first regular health updates.

She was endlessly optimistic, but she was very pragmatic too.

And in her opening to the uncertainty of what lay ahead, she offered a lot of hope to those around her too.

We all have our means of hiding from what scares us— I'm sure Chris had hers too— and it is natural that we do, as those mechanisms have kept us safe through many thousands of years of human evolution.

But the particular challenge of climate change requires us to find the courage to fully open to the difficulty of what lies ahead, even before we have been fully confronted by it.

Courage is like a muscle that we will need to strengthen, so that our fear of uncertainty or pain or death does not itself become the end of us. As Mandela said, courage is not the absence of fear but the triumph over it.

And it's contagious, too.

Courage to bring up climate change in conversations, or to make lifestyle changes that feel challenging, can inspire courage in others too. Just as Chris showed courage in the face of death, and in doing so inspired some courage in me too.

I won't pretend for a moment that I now don't find life in all its uncertainty pretty terrifying, or that I am even vaguely able to approach the prospect of climate change with a zen like serenity that would make the work I do so much less costly.

But Chris modelled courage to me in all sorts of ways, and my hope is that through this blog post that same courage might be shared with a few others too.

**About Me**
I’m Jo, formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.

Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.

On… Grief #2