May the force of hope be with us

These last 29 months my world has been nothing short of a roller coaster. A time of hatred, a time of love. A time of endless conflict and what seemed like total desperation.

Just under two and a half years ago my life hit its lowest ebb; a bottomless pit which seemed impossible to climb out of. It totally and dramatically changed me.

A woman I knew was executed. In the most barbaric of ways.

She was a unique woman. In time the world – but not too many locals, lost as we are in parochial idiocy and national pettiness – learnt what a great woman she was. They applauded her unreservedly. While we, locals who miss out on heroes except for the X-Factor type, barely understood how important she was.

I feared her because she was tenacious, straight to the point and cared not if the whole country was against her. Her point was her point. In her world shades of grey were just shady excuses to let omertà and fence-sitting triumph.

When she was murdered, went into shock.

Until October 16th 2017, my life-long religion was hope. I always believed we would eventually crawl out of our tunnel, that things were not as bad as we imagined.

Then that car bomb turned hope to desperation. If Daphne Caruana Galizia had been silenced, what point was there in my uttering words in the wilderness that had descended upon us?

Why keep up my petty effort to right the wrongs of the island, to keep telling everyone “look at the dots, join them and you end up in Castille, where corruption is rampant and impunity rules”?

I thought: to hell with my grandiose hopes of seeing change, of even getting one person to see it my way. Let it all go to rot. Let me, too, join the positive people and live happily ever after in total amnesia.

I sincerely believed that, with Daphne gone, nothing would

I ever change.

But I stopped for under 12 hours. I reasoned that, even if everything seemed bleaker, blacker, and the darkness denser, I owed it to Daphne to fight on. To utter my useless words, to not give up. Better to die trying uselessly than knowing I had been silenced. Why should fear, despondency and resignation, stop me?

Unlike Daphne I was never dehumanised. I was never attacked like her. I was never brutally murdered a million times while still alive. I was never called anything barbaric like she was hundreds of times a day. Yet she never gave up. Why should I?

I fought off my feeling of utter desperation, screamed against the horror, the assassination and that all the Castille gang should be hauled to court and to jail.

Then spring – eternally beautiful spring – 2018 dawned. And personally I received an amazing gift from the heavens.

The blackness that Malta represented was lightened by the arrival in Malta from India of my newly adopted grandson.

How could I lose hope? He had been lovingly moved from his country of origin and brought here to share our love, life and laughter.

I realised we must never give up. The road is long, the obstacles immense yet we must fight on. Whoever refuses to believe that each drop, each step, each word, each bit of resistance to the regime, was useless, was proved wrong towards the end of 2019.

The fight finally started bearing fruit and the edifice of the dark forces shook.

Hope had triumphed and, as if to highlight this, another bundle of joy arrived from India. While we were protesting, while we were shouting how right Daphne was and still is, my life was further transformed.

Malta is still in the throes of its worst times. Even if the edifice shook and the smugness of Joseph Muscat and his chief crook is gone, their replacement is still a continuation of the crookedness. And politics has been tainted God knows for how long.

For the sake of our children and their children, we need to remain vigilant and keep fighting for a better Malta. Without Daphne we are orphans forever. But we must never forget her. We will always be scarred but we must never give up.

For the first time since her assassination there will be no vigil to commemorate Daphne’s callous murder on the 16th of the month. It was postponed solely to safeguard the health of the people attending. Not out of fear, and certainly not because the fight for justice for Daphne is being given up.

Tomorrow, wherever you are, whoever you are, think of Daphne to help keep her presence alive so that hope will never die.