When the bad thing does not end

Almost everything written about hard times assumes they are events. Something happens, there is a period of difficulty, and then there is an after. Grief has stages and the stages conclude. Illness has a course. The bad year is followed by a better one.

A great deal of actual difficulty is not shaped like that. It is a condition that does not resolve, a person who needs caring for indefinitely, a search that enters its third year, a treatment that manages rather than cures, a loss that does not become smaller so much as it becomes furniture.

The writing for that situation is much thinner, and most of what exists is addressed to someone in month two. If you are in year four you will have noticed.

The first shape, and why it cannot hold

At the start, the wish is simple and enormous. Let this not be happening. Let the scan be wrong. Let him get better. Let there be a call this week.

A wish that size can be sustained for a while on adrenaline, and during that while it does something useful, because it keeps a person pointed at the outcome and the outcome may still be available. Early on, effort and hope are roughly aligned.

The problem is that a wish that size cannot be held for years. It is too heavy and it is checked too often. Every day it goes unanswered is a small refusal, and several hundred small refusals in a row do something to a person that the first few do not.

What people describe, when they describe it at all, is not that they gave up. It is that at some point they noticed they had stopped wishing it as often, and felt guilty about that, as though the wishing had been a duty they were failing.

What replaces it

The wishes get smaller and they get much closer. This is the most consistent thing about long difficulty and it is almost never described accurately, because from outside it looks like lowered horizons and from inside it is nothing of the kind.

Let her have a good afternoon. Let me get through Thursday. Let there be one night of proper sleep this week. Let the appointment not be moved again. Let nobody ask me how I am holding up in a particular tone of voice.

These are not a retreat from the real wish. They are the real wish broken into pieces that can actually be carried, and they have a property the big one lost: they are occasionally granted. A good afternoon does sometimes happen. Thursday does end. Something that is sometimes answered can be sustained for years, and something that is never answered cannot.

There is a whole collection of wishes for days like that elsewhere here, and what strikes me about them is how unambitious they are, and how little that matters.

The things nobody says about it

A few features of long difficulty that tend to get left out, mostly because they do not reflect well on anyone.

It gets boring. Not only frightening or sad. Boring, in a grinding and repetitive way, with the same forms and the same corridors and the same conversation with a different person who has not read the file. People are ashamed of finding a catastrophe tedious and almost all of them do.

The support drops off. Everyone arrives in the first fortnight. By month eight the messages have thinned, not out of malice but because the people sending them have their own lives and no framework for a thing with no end date. The loneliest part of a long illness is frequently not the beginning.

And some of the wishes that surface are ones a person cannot say to anybody. Anyone who has cared for someone for a long time knows the shape of the thought that arrives at three in the morning and is instantly buried. It arrives in decent people, constantly. It is what exhaustion sounds like, not what a person wants.

I am not going to end this by telling you it gets better, because for some of what I have described it does not, and I would rather write something useful to the people it does not get better for.

Some conditions are permanent. Some people do not conceive. Some searches end in taking work you did not want, and some do not end. The dead stay dead. There is a genre of consolation that cannot admit any of that, and reading it while living inside one of those situations is an isolating experience, because it quietly tells you that your case is the one that was not supposed to happen.

What I would say instead is narrower. Long difficulty changes what a wish is for. Early on it is aimed at an outcome. Later it is doing something different: it is a way of continuing to want things at all, inside a situation that keeps demonstrating that wanting is unrewarded.

That sounds bleak and I do not think it is. The alternative, the state where a person stops wanting anything because wanting has proved expensive, is much worse, and it is where a long stretch takes people if nothing interrupts it.

That is the whole argument for hope as a practice rather than a feeling, and long difficulty is the situation that argument was built for.

One last thing, for anyone reading this in the middle of one.

The wish you have carried for three years has not been wasted just because nothing came of it. That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of people in year three have quietly concluded they were foolish to have hoped, and are now embarrassed about the person they were at the start.

They were not foolish. They were responding to an open situation in the only way available, and the situation has since closed, and the closing was not a verdict on them. A wish does not have to come true to have been the right thing to have been holding at the time.

And if the only thing you can manage today is a small and unimpressive sentence about getting to Friday, that is not a reduced version of wishing. In a long season that is the entire thing, at full size.