Always Hope

I'm a huge Severus Snape fan. He had this one person in his life—one person with whom he could just be, one person who accepted him faults and all, one person with whom he thought he could happily spend the rest of his life with, and that one person was lost to him.

I know what it's like to lose your person.

It can corrupt you. It can twist you. It can make you bitter.

Losing your person is like losing all hope.

I've been there. It's dark. And scary. And really, really, really terrible.

Severus could have gone mental and started killing people off after Lily's death, because what the hell did he care? He was alone. He was in that seriously crappy place. But he didn't.

Because he still loved Lily. He would always love Lily. Always. And that love made it impossible for him to remain hopeless.

Like I said, I'm a huge Severus Snape fan. 

Today is the release day for my debut novel, Love and Other Unknown Variables.

Wow! What a surreal sentence! 

I know you're thinking, why are you talking bout Snape on release day? And I do want everyone to get Love and Other Unknown Variables and read it, I honestly do, because I think Charlie has something important to say. I think his story is meaningful. I think his story is full of hope and love and all the good things that make it worthwhile to get our butts out of bed every day. 

But what I want to talk about today, even more than my book (which you should totally go get, right now. I'll wait for you to get back…), is hope.

After my friend Em died, I felt a lot like I imagine Severus felt after Lily's death. I had wanted nothing more than to protect her, to save her, but I couldn't. Cancer was just too damn powerful. It stole away my friend. It took away my hope.

Because Cancer sucks.

Writing Love and Other Unknown Variables helped me find my lost hope. It hadn't gone far. Not really. It was just tucked away where nothing could hurt it again.

I believe that deep in our human heart resides infinite hope. And I know Charlie is rolling his eyes at me right now because hope is not part of any infinite set; but Chuck, seriously, listen! Our bodies may be finite, but inside our hearts, where hope and love and grace dwell, we are boundless. Hope knows no end.

And that feels pretty fantastic. And pretty scary, too, because with that much hope we should be able to do anything. Anything.

Like find a cure for cancer.

But when you're beaten by chemo, grief, or depression, it's awfully hard to feel infinite.

And that's when we need reminding. 

That's when we need to be like Severus. Always.

Soldiers of Hope (click to read an article and see a video) is an after school club at my daughter's school. It was started by fifth grade teacher Annette Probst and and a former student of hers. This student's mother was diagnosed with cancer, and Mrs. Probst wanted to do something to help her student cope with her mother's disease. She wanted to make her student feel powerful, even in the midst of cancer.

The student was an artistic girl who'd noticed that the walls at the infusion therapy lab where her mother did her chemo treatments were dull and uninspiring. Chemo treatments can take hours. Em had some that took six hours to complete. Six hours trapped in one room while toxins are pumped through your system can be unnerving. 

The Soldiers of Hope create inspirational art to be framed and hung in infusion therapy rooms in local hospitals and cancer centers. Patients found that the artwork of the Soldiers of Hope made their treatment time feel like it passed a little faster because they had something positive to focus on. They had something full of love and hope to keep them going.

I was lucky enough to get to help with the Soldiers of Hope last year. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I had to turn away to hide my tears from the earnest faces of students as they showed me their work. They inspired me.

They encouraged me to keep hoping. Always hope.

So with the launch of Love and Other Unknown Variables, a book I wrote to help me find my own hope again, I want to give something back. I'm going to take a page from the Soldiers of Hope. At my book events, I will be collecting messages of hope, names of survivors, and memories of those we've lost on cancer awareness ribbons. The collected ribbons will be arranged into pieces of art to be donated to cancer centers around the country in the hope that we can make one person's battle against cancer just a little better.

I'll need everyone's help to make this work. 

Keep checking my events page to see if I'll be coming to your area soon. And you can always add your messages to the comments below, tweet them @shanlalexander with the #AlwaysHope hashtag, send them to me on Facebook, or email me. As the art comes together, I'll be sharing it here and on Instagram.

Help me keep Hope alive. Always.

Okay, now you can go read that new book you've been dying to read!