The Right Moment May Never Come

Sometimes the hardest thing is not finding the right words, but staying close when there are no right words left. When nothing can be fixed, when there is no reassurance to offer, no promise that everything will be all right. This was what I kept thinking about while watching Oscar and the Lady in Pink, based on the work by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, with Svetlana Ivanova and Viktoria Tolstoganova in the leading roles.

Oscar is ten years old. He has terminal-stage leukemia and is in hospital. After an unsuccessful course of treatment, the doctors realise that he has very little time left. But none of the adults can bring themselves to tell him the truth. The only person Oscar can speak to openly is the Lady in Pink — Granny-Rose, as he calls her. She works as a volunteer at the hospital.

She invents stories about having once been a wrestler, “remembers” her former opponents, and generally speaks to Oscar with very little ceremony. He likes that. With her, he can be himself: he can get angry, argue, ask questions and make jokes. He does not have to choose his words carefully.

Granny-Rose suggests a game: from now on, each day will count as ten years. And in the few days he has left, Oscar gets to be a teenager, fall in love, get married, quarrel with the girl he loves, make up with her, grow old and move closer to death. His whole life unfolds in his imagination, but the feelings he experiences seem entirely real to me.

His parents hardly speak to him. They overwhelm him with toys while leaving him alone with the knowledge that he is going to die. It is not difficult to understand them. Their child is dying. How do you walk into his room and talk about it when the thought alone makes it hard to breathe? They love Oscar deeply, but their fear makes his loneliness worse. He feels even more frightened when he sees that his mother and father cannot cope. And so there is nowhere for him to take his own fear. Except to Granny-Rose.

She can listen without interrupting him with reassurance. She can answer directly. She can joke. She does not try to comfort him with false hope, deny what is happening, or hide behind familiar phrases. She helps him find a way to speak about what feels unbearable and to go on living even as death approaches. But she cannot change what is happening to him either.

It seems to me that this is one of the most difficult things in any relationship: accepting that we cannot help in the way we would like to. That nothing we say will make what is happening disappear. And yet we can still come, talk, listen, and through our presence help another person bear what cannot be changed.

In my work, I often see how difficult it can be simply to listen. Especially when another person’s experience touches our own fear, guilt or helplessness. It can feel as though an answer is required of us. But there are not always the right words for the right moment. And then we also have to bear ourselves — our own confusion, our wish to comfort immediately, our urge to move the conversation somewhere where it might feel even slightly easier.

Somehow, Granny-Rose knows how to remain beside Oscar. And life continues between them: with conversations, absurd stories, hurt feelings and love. He is still a ten-year-old boy. It still matters to him whether a girl called Peggy likes him, what the other children are doing, who has deceived whom. His illness does not take all of this away from him.

I find it difficult to accept the idea that an entire life can be lived in a matter of days. A great deal can be felt in that time; a great deal can be said. But this child should still have had so much more ahead of him. There is something here that makes me want both to cry and to rage at how unfair it is.

After the performance, I kept returning to one thought: we wait for the right moment to say what we feel, but that moment may never come. The other person is tired now. We are not ready ourselves. Things are difficult at the moment; perhaps it would be better not to start. First we need to understand ourselves, find the right words, work out what we actually want from the conversation.

All of that can be true. Not every conversation has to begin immediately. But sometimes months and years pass, and we are still preparing for it. We usually live with a sense that there is still time. There will still be time to ask what it was like for them, or to say what we are grateful for. There will still be time to say that something hurt, or to ask for forgiveness. There will still be time to explain why we became distant even though the person still matters to us.

And speaking can be frightening. What if it does not matter nearly as much to the other person? What if they dismiss it, or respond in a way that is nothing like what we hoped to hear? As long as we remain silent, we can at least preserve the hope that one day the conversation will happen exactly as we imagine it. But the other person is living with their own assumptions about us too. Perhaps they are waiting. Or perhaps they decided long ago that we simply do not care.

I do not think we can suddenly learn to treasure every minute. The next day will still bring errands, exhaustion, children, work and small irritations. It is impossible to live constantly aware that everything is finite. But perhaps one conversation that has been waiting for a long time can be started. Without a special occasion, even if the words do not yet come easily.

I think this is what has stayed with me most after the performance: the right moment may never come. But for now, we still have the possibility of saying something important to another person.