Kate Garraway - The Power Of Hope: The moving no.1 bestselling memoir from TV’s Kate Garraway

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First published by Bantam Press in 2021

Copyright Astra Aspera Ltd 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design by Richard Ogle/TW
Cover photography: Front cover Pal Hansen

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ISBN: 978-1-473-59334-3

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For Derek

And for everyone battling on through

Hope is not the conviction that something

will turn out well but the certainty that something

makes sense, regardless of how it turns out

Vaclav Havel

None of us was prepared for the coronavirus pandemic: how could we have been? Even world-class experts were confounded by this unknown virus and its consequences for our bodies, our lives, our livelihoods. No one has escaped its effect. Like a tornado, it has sucked in families, businesses and even governments, upending every aspect of our lives. Recently weve been standing, like The Wizard of Ozs Dorothy, praying that the storm has passed, watching the wreckage of our former lives drop down from the sky and wondering when the spinning will truly come to an end. In a sense, I think that were all not in Kansas any more. Our lives have changed for ever.

The virus has transformed my family, my marriage and my sense of self. Ive already shared some of that change with you on Good Morning Britain and on Smooth Radio, and maybe you have also seen the headlines and interviews in the papers. But just as much change has taken place in intensely private moments: the twitch of a finger, the flicker of an eye, the spark of hope kept alive in the small hours. And its these moments I want to share with you in this book.

Each of us has our Covid story to tell, and many of yours have helped me through some of the darkest nights and lowest points. I will never be able to thank you enough for all the love and kindness you have shown me. But I hope that in sharing our story with you, you may find some comfort in knowing that you havent been alone, that none of us has. Because although this has undoubtedly been the hardest year, for myself and my family, and for so many of you, it has also taught me an enormous amount about how much good is out there. And the true value of hope.

I believe that hope is the incredible force that can get us through, and that it is all around us, solid as a rock, if we just know how to find it. Like Dorothy, who finds out in the end that she didnt need the Wizard of Oz after all, we all have the ability to help ourselves. Dorothy turned out to have what she needed to get herself home, if she just clicked her heels and felt it. And each of us has inside us the trick to make the magic of hope work for us.

This is a big change for me. I dont think I understood hope at all before this year, even though I used the word all the time.

Are you going to be able to make it tonight?

Hope so!

Youll be brilliant at this! You have nothing to worry about!

Hope so!

Everything will work out in the end, youll see.

Hope so!

I used it almost like an apology in advance, a managing of expectations, when I didnt have the confidence that I could actually deliver anything I was hoping for. Id feel the urge to put it in when I couldnt be sure something was going to happen, when I wasnt confident something could be achieved, when there were no concrete facts available. For me, it was a try word, a genuine longing, yes, but a wish rather than a solid promise. I realize now that that is, in fact, the opposite of how hope works. As soon as you wish for something, long for it, use hope as anything less than a certain belief, it drives the magic of hope further from you.

I know this all sounds very hippie, but dont let that put you off. Twelve months ago I would have had little faith in it too. My working life has been built on facts, on evidence, on holding people to account if they couldnt prove their promises. And I relied on facts for my coping strategies in my personal life too. Whenever something went wrong, or didnt go as I wanted, I would always try to find out how I could change it, trying to learn everything I could to improve, drawing on my experience of the past, using the evidence of my life to form a plan for the future to see me through to whatever goal I wanted to achieve.

Theres nothing wrong with this, and its something Ive continued to do throughout this terrible year. Im glad I have because in many ways it has paid off. But its not the whole picture. The trouble with what we have all been through in the Covid pandemic is that at every stage we couldnt be truly confident of the so-called facts. There has been precious little evidence from our past life experience on which to build a confident plan. At every stage, confusion and uncertainty have undermined us. We have seen this in our politicians, sometimes seemingly brimming with bullish spirit about what they know, and the next minute upended by new information, dramatically changing their previous operating tactics, their ability to inspire trust left in tatters. We have seen it, too, in the brilliant scientists, having constantly to adjust their advice and their approach as Covid overturned what had previously been considered certain. Its been there in our medical professionals, fighting a war against a disease that defies their experience and their previous practice.

We have been living with crippling uncertainty and will have to live with it for many years to come.

We need something extra, some special magic and that magic is hope. And its in the heart of all that terrifying uncertainty.

In my personal Covid story, the uncertainty has been hardest to bear when I have seen it up close in our wonderful medical professionals. When the doctors could give me no guarantees as to whether Derek would live or die, whether he could hang on even for another hour or slip away like so many thousands of other poor souls, I felt fear might crush me, consume me, drown me. Even now with the medics still unable to confirm if and how Derek might recover, there are days when the endless not-knowing gnaws me to the bone.

How could I find hope when the people I trusted most to deliver my biggest hope, that Derek could survive, were left confounded? But as I struggled to stay afloat, I saw something even more powerful than medical facts and professional experience. It was the determination of doctors, nurses and other NHS workers to keep going against all the odds, against exhaustion, even putting their own safety at risk. They never gave up hope, in spite of everything they were faced with. It was their hope that drove them forward, their certain belief that the war could be won despite all the evidence of their eyes to the contrary. This drove them to learn quickly, to adapt and to invent new ways, to bring us the vaccine to fight on to a better future. Hasnt that spirit always driven the medical and caring professions? Until Covid brought a new awareness of their uncertainty to us, we had been able to fool ourselves that they knew everything. Now we have to accept that the experts arent always all-knowing, arent always all-confident. But we can truly believe in their spirit, their hope.