Nightmares, Chocolate Chips and the Hope That Saves Us

My Aunt still has chocolate chips in her pantry.

She lost her wife of over thirty years and then, her sight. She told me on the phone today she had a friend help her clean out her baking pantry and asked her to toss everything; she can no longer see to measure ingredients. Everything except the chocolate chips.

Every holiday, my Aunt would pull haphazardly into our steep driveway with her Pennsylvania plates. We would wait for her sing-song hello, piles of primary colored presents and her tote bag full of the ingredients to make Tollhouse cookies. A cook, she was not- but the lady could make a mean chocolate chip cookie. It was tradition. Which is funny, because- she’s allergic to chocolate.

She now palms the wall to find her way from the bathroom to the bedroom. Runs her finger round the rim of her cereal bowl to check how full. And she holds on to a bag of chocolate chips she can’t even eat.

Why?

I have slept fitfully with nightmares this month. A reoccurring dream from childhood haunts me still in vulnerable times. I am a witness to my own life, played out in a dollhouse. My parents are dying, each in separate rooms. I am watching as I open all the wrong doors to save them- I am shouting but I can’t hear me. The tub overflows and I watch it cascade down all three floors of the dollhouse and wake- heart pounding, sweat pouring. I have found myself repeating gently to own soul- I have you. I will take care of you. You are safe now. I can only fall back to sleep when the sun begins to rise and the night has passed.

After all these years, I am still terrified something terrible will happen to someone I love, and I will not be able to rise to the occasion. I still believe it’s my job to save them.

Though I am not discrediting C.S. Lewis’s literary genius in all other works, I am bold enough to say that Puddleglum is the best character he had ever written. I don’t know of any other who holds out hope the way he does. (If you’re unsure who I’m referring to, read The Silver Chair, in the Chronicles of Narnia series.) When Puddleglum was facing the very real possibility that everything he ever believed to be true might be a lie- he decided he would rather continue living in make-believe, as it sure beat the real world.

Puddleglum held on to hope when there was none.

My Aunt does the same with chocolate chips.

I am not a nature hope-er. I am a pessimist disguised as a pragmatist. Hope is not an easy choice- especially now. Given what we’ve been through. Given what we’re facing.

And yet- I am finding myself more and more often holding my own hand in the darkness and finding the hope there.

Why?

My Aunt will never be able to bake cookies herself again- but she could do it with some help. Help means company, community, and belonging. Help means hope.

The daily nightmare I face in not being the one who controls the universe would never be able to be tackled without a community of support and a good therapist- but it is my own self who holds the hope in the dark and makes promises within my power to keep.

I do not pretend I understand hope at all. I’m sure it doesn’t make any outward sense. Mary Oliver says, “I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you’re in it just the same. So why not get started immediately? I mean, belonging to it.”

I did not know her, but if I had to guess- if Mary ever lost her sight, she would have still kept chocolate chips in her pantry.