Three simple lessons
Embracing our emotions is an act of liberation.
A good man was born 53 years ago today. I met him seven months into my time in the United States; he interviewed me for a job. Fifteen months later, we got married under a glorious maple tree in an eighteenth century farm in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Because of him, I stayed in the United States and embraced his country as my own.
Mike Saucier nourished me. He believed in me. He supported me and reminded me constantly that I am great exactly as who I am. “Be you,” he used to tell me. “Do your thing.” I honor him today as I land in Salvador, Bahia, my hometown in Brazil and a place he adored. I have our daughter by my side and she honored him by eating a brigadeiro as soon as we arrived, his favorite dessert. (Pictured below is sunset at Praia do Flamengo, where my parents live.)
I struggled with guilt after Mike died. Could I have done anything to help him? Did I dismiss his complaints about the back pain he’d felt, which turned out to be a symptom of the cancer that took him from us? I’ve learned to forgive myself, though. I cannot change the past. I can, however, choose how to live today and tomorrow and who I want to include in my life.
I spent the early part of this week in Florida in the company of a special person, one of those I’ve chosen to welcome into the tightest of circles around me. (I guard that circle well.) One evening, we squeezed together into an Adirondack chair, under a carpet of stars, and he pulled up on his phone the famous 1993 speech by legendary basketball coach Jim Valvano.
Now, I had never heard of Jimmy V. To me, watching his speech was an opportunity to learn something about the person sitting next to me, which I did, but that’s not the point of bringing up this moment. The point is to highlight the simple lesson I learned from Jimmy V. Here it is, in his own words:
There are three things we all should do every day. If we do this every day of our life, you’re going to … What a wonderful … Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears. Could be happiness or joy, but think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.
After my first book, The Fire Line, came out, I used to feel uncomfortable when readers told me that it made them cry. I associated tears with sadness and defined sadness as an emotion we should avoid at all cost. Whenever it hits us — because invariably it will — we should hide it and hide our tears. It took losing Mike to learn that it’s OK to embrace sadness. It’s OK to cry. It took losing Mike to learn that there’s no greater act of self-acceptance and liberation than to allow ourselves to feel.
Because I’m not afraid to feel, I can love fully.
Because I’m not afraid to feel, I can write freely.
Because I’m not afraid, I can embrace my vulnerabilities as my power.
Laugh, think and cry. Simple, right? I’ve done each of them today already, though the tears I’ve shed weren’t sad tears at all. They were tears of gratitude — for having the strength to move forward, the drive to shape my todays, the courage to embark in new experiences and the discernment to know exactly who deserves to be by my side.
May you all find opportunities to laugh, think and cry, whatever the reason might be.
If you’re feeling generous this holiday season, consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Sauce Foundation, created in Mike’s memory to provide scholarships to first-generation college students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and funding pancreatic cancer research at the Translation Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Jimmy V. also died of cancer and there’s a foundation in his honor too, which has raised many millions for cancer research. Check it out.
With love and purpose, always.
Fernanda.