Lost in Hope (short story)

This is a story I’m currently working on, so you are getting the very first glimpse of this initial draft. What started as a mix of fiction and nonfiction has turned into (mostly) fiction. While the basic events are based on a true story (I did attend a holistic retreat center, I did meet a woman from Norway, the end of the story is based on reality), I’ve embellished so much in terms of events, conversations and even internal thoughts of the protagonist that I’m dubbing this fiction.

As always, I’d appreciate any and all feedback as you read this. I’ll be back with another installment (or maybe the rest!) next week.

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“I want to go where she’s going.”

Sigrid stood across the table from us, her soft, childlike smile and twinkly eyes trained on me.

The group had been talking about where to spend our last night at The Hope Center, the final evening before the graduation ceremony and goodbyes the next day. It had been three weeks of intensive healing, detoxing and eating only raw vegan food. This last night was our opportunity to take the practice into the real world, to see how well we could integrate the lifestyle into our normal lives.

When I first heard about The Hope Center, I wasn’t sure it would be for me. Or, rather, that I would be for it. Knowing about its ultra-strict rules—exclusively raw, plant-based foods; no outside food or drink; no makeup or chemicals of any kind; strict healing protocols; required attendance at four hours of lectures per day—it was a lot for anyone to take in.

The Center, a huge, self-contained retreat location in Florida, was renowned among health foodies and woo-woo types for its history of “curing” cancers of all kinds. I didn’t have cancer, thankfully; but after five years of chronic digestive issues, mystery rashes that covered my entire midsection, fatigue and basically all-around feeling like crap, I thought it might help to try a super-strict detox. Besides, three weeks of raw vegan food and freshly-squeezed wheatgrass juice actually sounded like heaven to me. I envisioned the stay as a kind of vacation. Well, a vacation with bonus healing, all inclusive.

As soon as we arrived that first afternoon, we were directed to the main medical building, where we submitted to a barrage of blood tests and a long questionnaire recording our weight (ouch), height, and an extensive health history. Further customized tests were suggested for a fee.

Image: Alina Karpenka, Unsplash

Still a bit stunned and barely aware of our idyllic surroundings, we were then corralled into a large, almost empty room in a barnlike structure across campus. Folding chairs lined up against three of the four walls, facing toward the center of the room. On the fourth wall was a long wooden table laden with water and pitchers of green juice, and in the center of the floor, like a conductor before the orchestra, a padded chair stood waiting for our group therapist, Jeff, a sixty-something hippie holdover with a long grey ponytail, chambray cowboy shirt and crinkly blue eyes.

It was there I first met Sigrid. About 25 of us shuffled in and found our seats around the room. Maybe twenty of us were new arrivals who’d just started that day and would work through the curriculum together over the upcoming three weeks. The others were repeat participants from previous weeks or even months, people who’d already completed their program but decided to stay on in the Center for more support. I learned that one woman with multiple sclerosis (MS) had been there for six months, basically a permanent resident at that point.

Jeff introduced himself and then asked us each to say a bit about ourselves: name, where we were from, and what brought us to the Hope Center. His voice had that soft, soothing quality that so many holistic practitioners share, a deliberate slowness and quiet, as if cooing while cradling a sleeping infant. We could all use the comfort.

There was Annette, who, like me, had traveled from Boston. Annette had developed colon cancer less than a year after her husband died from it. She’d originally attended The Center with her husband when he fell ill and had seen great results in his case—as long as he stuck with it. So she returned now to jumpstart her own healing. There was Gillian, a striking woman in her 60s with perfectly coiffed silver hair, makeup and jewelry. She wore a long, flowing silk caftan covered in tropical flowers that would seem like camouflage once she stepped outside the building. She told us about her shock when, after eight years of remission, her cancer had returned. Gillian was currently undergoing radiation, which had caused her hair to fall out. So that’s a wig? I thought. I couldn’t believe it. Mason was still a kid, really, just seventeen and dealing with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. He was in a rare remission stage and determined to come out of it. He had the kind of hollow eyes that suggested many previous years of dealing with his illness, even at his young age.

And then there was Sigrid from Norway. She’d had breast cancer three years earlier and now it was back. Her oncologist had convinced her to undergo a masterctomy, but once that first breast was removed, she knew immediately she’d refuse further surgery and insisted on coming to the Center after reading about the great results from their program. Besides, her idol, Catelyn Connolly, had spent time here and look at her now: ten years after a stage-four liver cancer diagnosis, and she was thriving. The image of health.

Sigrid was 39 but looked sixteen. She made me think of Heidi, the eponymous heroine in the children’s book, with her green eyes, round, rosy cheeks and pale skin with a subtle suggestion of freckles. Her hair, a dull blonde, was cut into a bob that she tucked behind her ear over and over as it slipped away and toward her chin. Her smile, almost a straight line across her lower jaw, seemed the only facial expression she knew. She had a husband and three young children at home, and because of them, she said, she wanted to get better.

Sitting there with my hands awkwardly folded in my lap, my too-large stomach straining against the elastic of my shorts, I felt like a fraud. These were people with serious illnesses: you know, the kind that can kill you. Me, on the other hand? I had rashes. Yes, they were awful rashes, yes, they spread across my entire abdomen and yes, they tormented me constantly. But I was not at risk of imminent death. If you looked at me from the outside, sitting there in my cotton tank and too-tight shorts, you wouldn’t even guess anything was wrong. I looked like any regular, overweight American, crashing a meeting of cancer patients.

Continue reading “Lost in Hope” here.

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