Abandon Every Hope: What I Learned from a Bath

Prologue

ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE. These words—their aspect was obscure—I read inscribed above a gateway, and I said: “Master, their meaning is difficult for me.” And he to me, as one who comprehends: “Here one must leave behind all hesitation; here every cowardice must meet its death. For we have reached the place of which I spoke, where you will see the miserable people, those who have lost the good of the intellect.”

 -The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III, Lines 9-18

Perhaps it’s a little theatrical to open a story about a bath with the words written above Dante’s entrance to Hell, but the last six months were pretty damn terrible. My 13-year-old pug had, seemingly out of nowhere, gotten terminally sick. Between his diagnosis in early-December until his passing at the end of April, much of my time was spent taking him to specialists, not sleeping because he was restless in the middle of the night, and maxing out credit cards to pay for exams that continued to show “causes unknown” and for medicines that he wouldn’t take. December through April was also when I was the busiest I’d ever been in my professional life. The classes I was taking, the classes I was teaching, and my job all demanded more from me than they had before, and at work, things were a mess. As anyone who has ever worked in higher education knows, when one piece of administration shifts, every tier below feels the stress. This past spring, it wasn’t one piece; there were changes at almost every level. And my team was on especially unstable ground for several months.

My house, my eclectic bungalow sanctuary, had one problem after another, and more often than not, it was home to memories I wanted to forget. The final anticlimactic scene of a marriage that had ended years before still lingered somewhere near the front door. The backyard, so full of potential for conversations and earthy blooms, was filled with tangled weeds and limbs that fell every time it rained. My home office, once the most brilliant, light-filled room in the house, was now a space of tension and mounting questions about the future. Lights stopped working, the air conditioner rattled, and the plumbing showed signs of its mid-century age. Sweet Luna, mourning the loss of her pug-brother, was on constant watch, staring at the dark corners where the spirits and energies hid. My relationship, like all the other parts of those months, was shaky. And I watched as yet another friend fought with the end stages of cancer. It was a lot and it all seemed to happen at the same time.

I had felt so much for so long that I was allowing those feelings to impact every aspect of my life. I wasn’t going to yoga or meditating. My work wasn’t my best, and I couldn’t seem to get caught up. And counterproductive to my healing and what I needed most, a strong support system, I had isolated myself. The thing is, I knew better. I know how to handle stress and consider myself an emotionally intelligent person. But something was different this time. Beyond all those frustrations, there was some unfamiliar emotion that echoed, a vibration that underscored and amplified all the others. Clearly I had been angry, sad, and exhausted before, but how I felt these last couple of months was unquestionably foreign. It was more debilitating, more malignant. As Dante would have said, more wretched.