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I've just recorded a show on "Hope" for Sound & Spirit. It will air nationally the week of 6/3-6/10. We're now on 120 stations around the country (airing at various different times - details up on our website: http://www.wgbh.org/pri/spirit. You can also hear the show webcast on a lot of carrying stations). I was working on the script just after Jenna died, and what happened the week we lost her very much on my mind. So I made it part of the script.
Here's the actual script: Imagining a better future is what hope is all about: if you can picture it, you can want it, you can hope for it. There are times in your life when hope is easier to come by than others. Novelist Ellen Glasgow wrote, "Youth can never know the worst . . . because the worst that one can know is the end of expectancy." (Barren Ground (1925)) In other words, as long as you can look forward to something, you can hope. The Greek poet Pindar said: "Only at the end of life is there no hope for this one." The first time I ever saw anyone buried, I really got it. The dirt knocked on the top of my grandpa's coffin, and I thought - this is it. Nothing more will ever happen to him. I promised myself then: if ever I start toying with the idea of ending my own life, I will remember this moment. Whatever you may believe about the next world, that's it for this one. Dum spiro, spero, wrote Cicero the Roman orator; while I breathe, I hope. My friend Jenna stopped breathing one night. She had a bad allergy attack, and by the time they got her to the hospital, she was unconscious. They gave her drugs, they put her on a respirator . . . But she stayed in a coma. While Jenna was still breathing, we told each other stories of people who had been taken off life support and miraculously revived. I kept saying, "We still have hope." I was probably being silly - especially after the EEG came back with no brain activity. But hope only died when Jenna died.
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