Death of a Dream

Dreams are the things that hopes are made of .. or is it hope is the thing that dreams are made of. Either way, when a dream dies, it is hard to deal with that reality. Sometimes our dreams are the things that we used as a guideline, a goal that we were shooting for. Sometimes our dreams are unrealistic and hence unrealized..

When a person realizes that the dream that they sought and had put so much into is gone.. it is hard to get over.

Dreams are funny things. Some of them are attainable, but not meant for this time or place in our lives, while others die so that new ones can surface. And still others should never be....

Dreams encapulate our hopes. Hope is a good thing. It helps us to look to the future and focus on what we want out of life. It gives us a positive view of the world and the things that are in it.. but hope is also aware that not everything is rosy.. that not everything is perfect. No .. hope does not deny the evil the world, but works to move us beyond it. There is a quote that I have found about this.. I will have to add it later.

Still it is hard to move when we realize the death of a dream for whatever reason it dies. It is then our task to figure out how to move on, and find the dream/hope that best fits the place where we are.

Loss of hope.. an epidemic

This past weekend, there was a theme at work. It seems that too many people are depressed and have lost hope. I was paged for a 93 year old woman who kept asking why can't I help her die. She had lost her family members and friends had died as well. She saw nothing worth living for.
Then as I was leaving the building for the day. I was paged twice for 2 other depressed patients in various parts of the building. So I went to talk to the first person I was paged for. It was urgent. This was a man who was also depressed. His story told me of a lot of losses in his life -- relationships, faith community, declining health.

There are a lot of people whom I hear about that are depressed and have lost hope. Often at work, there are referrals to psychiatry and then the person is given anti-depressants. I believe that these are valid, but often I find the depression is related to a grief reaction. As per the common understanding of grief, written by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, depression is a stage/reaction of grief. It is one of my frustrations that my profession is forgotten when it comes to issues like loss of hope, or wanting to die. Regardless of how much we educate, obviously there is still more work to be done.

So the 93 year old was most difficult. She was saying that I should "push the red button", bring her the gun and she would do it... "I will". It was hard to know what to say. The nursing staff and I weren't giving her the answers that she wanted... in the end, she was appeased by a peanut butter sandwich. This distracted her for about 20 minutes..

It makes me wonder though. What is it that causes people to give up? To lose hope and to want to die. Often there is something missing in life, and sometimes it relates to an ideal not reached..
makes me wonder.