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What If Faith is Not Enough?

A Childhood Cancer Survivor Poem
© 2016 Christine Mulvihill

When reality finally hits you it hurts
When the truth comes into focus it’s brutally painful.
Hope isn't always enough
It’s not always a happy ending.
What happens when faith is not enough?

I get hot flashes
My depression splashes
My soul is cold like stone,
The fear of being alone.

So now I lay me down to sleep
I pray you lord my soul to keep
Don’t let me die before I wake
I pray you lord my soul do not take.

I barely have a past
And may have no future
       Empty pages of a book
       A story left unwritten
       A life left unlived
       A hope left in the dust.
Please don't take me yet
Your mercy you won't regret
I am down on my knees
Begging you please
Don’t take me away.

At night I dream a misty graveyard
A tombstone the name I cannot see
A flashlight in the darkness
A figure so lifeless I cannot breathe,
Then I awake not as fearless as I may seem.

If this is my future
And if it comes to pass
And this breath be my last
Then this thought to you I cast.

What if faith is not enough?
Then life would be rather tough
With nothing to believe in
And nothing to justify
Nothing to keep you sane
Nothing to grasp when you fall
You will have nothing, nothing at all.

Sometimes that is how I am
Falling in the darkness
With nothing to take hold
This feeling leaves me cold
hearted, soulless, empty.
All I feel is the pain of being unreal
No one knows how this life feels,
When you are so lifeless.

So now I lay me down to cry
I pray you lord you can't let me die.
Now I lay me down to sleep
Close my eyes without a peep
Never to be opened again.


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