What time is the darkest hour?  Is it only an hour or is that a euphemism for however long it last and they just don’t want to scare us?  I don’t think there is a definitive time.  It will be different for each of us and I think, when it actually comes, we will all be only a little surprised.  Something will happen to us, something unforeseen and really terrible.  Individually we’ll hold ourselves and barely be able to breath.  And then we’ll know.  This is our darkest hour.

Literature has covered it nicely in all the forms it can take.   Shakespeare covered it very well in his tragedies, King Lear when he realizes where the truth of a daughter’s love lay, Hamlet when he was debating in despair whether “to be or not to be,” and at end of Romeo and Juliet when the prince cast “shame on both your houses” and the two warring families realized the cost of arrogance and pride.

If you’re going for the darkest hour in literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald also handled it nicely in The Great Gatsby and in The Beautiful and the Damned.  Both novels are filled with characters that are weak-willed, shallow, and/or delusional which never ends well.

What of reality?  Ask the question when is the darkest hour and you will get as many answers as there are people to ask.  It will call to each of us in a different way, from our own perspective.

I lived on an oncology ward for six months while my mother was dying.  I saw the darkest hour over and over.  I saw it in the mornings in the eyes of relatives when they walked in early only to realize their loved one had not survived the night after they had gone home to rest.  Their grief and guilt at not being there for the final moments seemed like they joined hands and ran over these survivors over and over until their sobs were shut out by the closing of the elevator doors as they left the ward forever.

I saw it in the afternoon on the faces of the other patients as well as in my own mother’s eyes, that lingering darkness and fear of wondering when.  When will death come?  What if I just close my eyes to nap, will I wake up?  I learned to see that uncertainty in the eyes and hear it in the trembling voices of the patients my mother and I got to know during that half a year, her last half a year ever.

I saw it at night, sometimes in the faces of the nurses who had gotten to know a patient, especially one who didn’t have any family.  These patients were so alone with their disease, each day, each hour of loneliness while they waited to die.  The nurses would coddle them, visiting with them, getting to know them and their stories.  And you’d see the sadness on in their eyes when the vigil was called.  The stats on the patient would show that the last hours were ticking off.  The nurses would go in to check more frequently on the ones who were alone.  More work for them but they never seemed to mind.  No one should be left to die alone.  And they grieved.  The nurses did.  They felt the loss and the suffered a darkest hour.  I asked one of the nurses who had “adopted” me.  I was 20 and living at the hospital so that my mother wasn’t alone.  She would stop in and check on me.  She’d bring me fashion magazines and movie magazines.  That’s what we called them back then.   She gave me a window into the world of youth I was supposed to be in rather than sitting with my dying mother.  I asked this nurse if she was grieving.  She was surprised that I had noticed, as it was her job to keep those emotions under wraps.  She said that she was, that the old man two doors down had died while she was reading to him from his favorite book, a Hemingway.  I know this because for a change of scenery I would go and read to him.  Different room.  Different face.  Different cancer.  Same ward.  Same ending.  He had lost his wife twenty years before and they had not been blessed with children.  He was alone.  The nurse started crying.  It was a rare occurrence to see one cry, but she cried for the old man.  He had already left arrangements in order but it seemed so impersonal to her, and to me.  She felt such sadness that I wonder, even today, if that was a type of darkest hour for her.  See, she was a widow who had never been blessed with children.  She was also, in a way, alone.  Friends are wonderful but they do not have the same love shining in their eyes that our spouses or children or grandchildren do.  I wonder if she saw her future in his death?  I wonder if she did, indeed, die with only a nurse sitting beside her to cry?

For some, I wonder if the darkest hour is at the moment of death?  Did my mother who had lapsed into a coma never to awaken feel that darkness closing in?  Was she afraid?  Did she cry and the tears couldn’t come?

What about those who do not want to die but live a life of risk?  Fishermen.  The photo I’ve attached is one I took while standing on the Dog Bar in Gloucester, MA.  Lobstermen were furiously working to get on the other side, behind it’s protection.  They were fighting a heavy sea with a load of traps and lobsters onboard.  There is a Coast Guard station on the spit and one of the men was standing behind me on the walkie talking to the captain of the boat.  The Coast Guard was standing at the ready just in case.  I could hear both sides of the conversation.  The captain was shouting out orders at the same time he was talking to the Coastie.  His voice, while calm, had an edge.  Men who fight the sea know what they’re up against.  They understand that they are at risk.  But that doesn’t detract from their desire to keep living, from wanting desperately to make it home.  Is the darkest hour the one where men or women who never thought they would die, find themselves in a sudden life or death situation where the percentages of living or dying pitch and yaw and roll like a small boat in a large, angry ocean?

What about a soldier who’s being sent out and faces the very distinct possibility of combat?  Will it be an ambush?  Gunfire?  A bomb?  What about hand-to-hand?  My husband was a Marine, Force Recon with three tours in Vietnam.  He talked about being afraid.  He talked about how dark the nights were, and how the dampness rotted everything they wore.  He spoke of his mates talking quietly to each other, softly to their families half a world away, or to a God they weren’t sure knew where they were.  One boy asked my husband before he died if God knew where Vietnam was?  My husband assured him that God knew exactly where to come get him.  My husband was sent out alone a lot or with only one other man, his spotter.  One of his jobs was sniper.  He told me that back then there wasn’t a sniper school like there is now.  They just picked the boys who had been crack shots at rabbit hunting with one hand on the rifle while the other held onto the beer while steering the pickup.  I think he was teasing me a bit, but then again, it was Vietnam.  A different time.  My husband told me he was often afraid he would be killed in action and no one would find his body.  So, do soldiers have their darkest hour during the entire time they are at risk?  From the way my husband talked about all he did as a Marine, I think there is an ebb and flow of the darkness that can surround the soul, but like low tide, you can still see the water.  It’s lapping at the sand, or the edges of the mind, ready for that change in the tide.

At 11:30 PM tonight my own personal darkest hour will have been going on for thirteen weeks.  I don’t see any light headed my way.  My husband died of a sudden and catastrophic heart attack.  I use catastrophic in the sense that he gasped, he, well, it is something I will see forever in my mind.  His face.  His eyes.  Was that his darkest hour?  Did he know I was scared out of my mind?  Did he hear me crying for him?  Did he feel my hands on his chest, my kisses on his forehead, his neck?  Was he afraid of death and that was his darkest hour?  Or was his darkest hour due to his despair at having to leave me and knowing how bereft I would be?  How bereft I am?

My darkest hour started then and hasn’t stopped.  It has lasted so long now that I am now sure it can be defined as a darkest hour.  Is there a time limit of darkest hour?  Each hour of my life since he died has been filled with the darkness of doubt, fear, worry, tears, grief, and loneliness.

I think the darkest hour is as personal as despair, and death in whatever form it takes.  From your own death to your view of someone else’s, from divorce to unrequited love that breaks off your soul.  From those who feel bad enough to verbalize their thoughts of taking their own life as a cry for help to those who never speak of their plans and very quietly, serenely, and with great purpose take their own lives.  The play ‘Night Mother is an outstanding conversation between two women, a mother and daughter, on the night the daughter executes her careful plan to end her life.  For those interested, Sissy Spacek and the wonderful Anne Bancroft did a fantastic film of the play.  Watch it and think about that question.  What time is the darkest hour?  For whom in the play?

My darkest hour has been the long weeks on this horrible road of loneliness and grief since my husband died.  The next worst thing that can happen to me will only deepen the darkness.  It will not, could not make it any worse.