The Luminist

On a steely gray January day in 2017, I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of Bed, Bath and Beyond. 

Giant plastic bags of new king-sized pillows filled my back seat. It was two months after Mike had died and obviously I had turned to buying new pillows to fill a fraction of the gaping chest wound where my soul had been.

My phone rang… I half-heartedly decided to rejoin reality.

“Hey there, just checking in! How are things?” Luanne chirped. 

“Well, I’m sitting here surrounded by new pillows,” I dully replied.

“Ok, well that’s good!” Ever enthusiastic and supportive even when she thought what I was doing was nutso. 

“Listen, I’m doing this consulting engagement, and this company needs a Chief Growth Officer, and I am going to put your name into the hat for consideration. I am calling to make sure that is ok. But really I am not asking you. You can do this. You should do this. You would be great at it.”

At that point in time, I pretty much did whatever Luanne told me to do. I trusted her judgment during a time when I could not locate my own with a thousand-person army kitted out with klieg lights. 

“Ok, if you say so,” I said glumly.

“I say so. So, yes,” she replied.

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Fast forward six years, and I’m slack jawed in an airplane coming back from an international meeting.

I went to the interview, I got the job, blah blah blah. But more importantly, now I’m watching The Return of Tanya Tucker as I fly over the Atlantic, and I’m in awe.

It’s like hearing my own story, my shared story with Luanne, from an alternate universe. 

In this universe, I’m Tanya, a teen country sensation. I had my first hit at 13. It was a rapid rise, followed by a hard fall. Drugs. Alcohol. Lots of sexist b******t along the way. Tanya (me) has not made an album in almost 15 years… Then Brandi Carlile (Luanne) shows up. Brandi feels the loss in the world of this amazing talent, someone who had influenced her own career from afar. So through highs and lows, fits and starts, frustration and joy, she and her team coax an album from Tanya, and more importantly, coax Tanya back into believing in herself.

Ok, not everything about the story is identical. I’m not famous, my pit looked more like grief and despair than drugs and alcohol, I only sing along with my car radio. But the broad strokes gave me chills. The fall, the listlessness, the return to confidence with the help of the irreplaceable friend.

While most people were politely averting their eyes as me/Tanya crawled into a hole, Luanne/Brandi were rolling up their sleeves, preparing to drag us out of it.

But Brandi and Luanne aren’t the first people in the world to try to save their friends from downward spirals. Why were they successful?

Why are both Tanya and I able to smile broad smiles as we share our redemption stories?

What’s the secret to helping another?

What’s the secret to being a ‘Brandi’ in someone’s life?

I think this is worth a return to 1996.

At 26, I was a wet-behind-the-ears MBA heading into my big new job. The orientation for my coveted corporate gig involved a gaggle of fresh-off-the-boat MBAs just like me, coming together at a conference center to get inculcated into the corporate culture and hone our presentation skills. My BFF Julie was also in attendance as we’d taken jobs for the same firm but in different cities. The rest of the class was made up of strangers who were carbon copies of Julie and me. 

Expect one... Oozing intensity and business acumen, short black hair, wiry runner’s frame, a sharp, smart answer to every question. The rest of us were in awe. 

I was intimidated but also intrigued. Turns out that she was also going to be working in the same DC office as me. In other words, not a random meteor I’d never see again, but someone who would be in my everyday solar system. Getting to know her was the practical thing to do. I approached her with wide eyes like a dog curious about a cat, but worried about those claws. 

Turns out that was all in my head. 

I didn’t know it yet, but it was Luanne. It was my Luanne.

Through the years we worked in each other’s orbit. Our careers advanced. We had babies. We had conversations. I worked for her. She came to me for advice. Our lives were on parallel tracks; it was priceless for us to have a friend, ally, cheerleader, and b******t-incinerator walking by our side.

When my world imploded, our connection proved to transcend work. Luanne was at the viewing and the funeral, making sure no details slipped through the cracks. She brought the glasses to my house for the reception. She showed up in my driveway, eyeballing me to see how I was really doing. She cried along with me at many breakfasts.

She didn’t look away, she leaned in.

Luanne became one of my touchstones. 

I don’t know if she meant to do it or some mysterious grief gravity pulled her into it, but it just became the way it was. Her check-in texts were a part of daily reality as the days, weeks, months since Mike’s last breath petulantly marched by. 

Luanne was far from my only touchstone, but she focused her efforts specifically on my career. She knew how hard I had worked to get to where I was and wasn’t going to let anything — grief, despair, woe is me, I don’t wanna — ruin it.

She also knew grief. She had played the work-and-heal-at-the-same-time game herself. So she knew when to apply a light touch (see the pillow enthusiasm above), and she wasn’t afraid to try a heavier hand when she sensed I was sinking. 

In the alternate universe where we are country singers, Brandi was likely also able to help Tanya in a way others could not because she got it.

No amount of sympathy can replace empathy.

In Luanne, I had a friend who had been through the pain of loss, who could commiserate, and who could say, “keep going, you can do this,” and I actually believed her. Many people told me something similar in those days, and while I’m grateful for all of them, with Luanne it wasn’t just a nice thing to say. Her entire being reverberated with the certainty of my ability to overcome and prevail. She acted on it. She fought for me with my future boss. She debriefed with me after every interview during the process. 

Just like in the alternate Brandi/Tanya universe, Luanne was not doing this out of charity or pity. She was doing it because she knew me. She believed in what I had to offer to this job, this company, this community. She believed I should be out in the world leading people, not at home licking my wounds forever. She believed I could provide for my family. She believed I would find strength and purpose again. 

She wasn’t holding my hand, she was treating me like I was the best version of myself who had simply gotten amnesia and forgotten what she was capable of.

Eventually her belief started pulling me into resonance, into self-belief, too.

Now Luanne tells everyone “I’m going to hold the lights when Sue’s onstage for her intimate-venue, worldwide Luminist Speaking Tour!” 

No matter the circumstances — a launchpad to the job that changed my life or supporting my dream of changing the world — Luanne is there to believe in me before I believe in myself.

That’s what Brandi’s do. They don’t just hug us, console us, offer tissues and soothing words. These things are desperately needed and heartily welcomed. But they are not enough to qualify as a Brandi. Brandi’s do more:

* They ACT. They challenge us. They cajole us. They encourage us.

* They can speak from personal experience. No platitudes here, only honesty.

* They know when to push and when to hold. Sometimes, they put up with our b******t foot-dragging and self-confidence lapses. And sometimes they don’t take “no” for answer.

* They don’t pity us. Because they’re not actually saving us. They’re just attaching the jumper cables that will light a fire under our ass so we can get going by our own power and volition.

Which leads me to my final point. Luanne doesn’t care if I’m a corporate bigwig or if I’m writing a newsletter about loss and life. She’s here to support my dreams, wherever they lead me.

Her goal was never to get me to a certain destination. It was to reignite my life force so I once again felt confident being in the driver’s seat of my life, pedal to the metal.

Six years ago, the job interview Luanne strong-armed me into made perfect sense. Chief Growth Officer would mean I was working to inspire, motivate, and improve people’s lives. I don’t know if you can tell, but give me half a chance to talk about these topics and I can basically rise from the dead. Brandi also knew that Tanya needed a taste of inspiring people again, just in her way — with a microphone, from the stage.

Tanya and I both worried that we had lost our spark. Brandi and Luanne made sure we rediscovered it. It’s so simple, it makes me want to smack my forehead, Homer Simpson style.

They just reintroduced us to ourselves.

It is an odd, contradictory fact of being human that others see us more clearly than we can.

We all sell ourself short in one way or another. But through the gaze of that other, we can find our true reflection.

Here’s to our Brandi’s, and to being Brandi’s ourselves,

Sue

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

“Deep dish or thin crust?”

“Dad, we are in Chicago,” I responded, “of course the pizza has to be deep dish!”

We were sitting at my dad’s kitchen island. Even though I had been there for almost two hours, I was still reveling in the sight of him, taking deep breaths like I was trying to inhale his presence into my cellular memory… which I was.

I had not seen him since Kendall’s graduation in June, and since his stroke shortly thereafter.

It had all begun with a fall and a jumble of words, and then — due to his wife Gail’s quick thinking — rapidly progressed to an ambulance trip to the Northwestern ER. A week in the hospital. Numerous tests. Multiple medications. Lots of specialists. A diagnosis of an asymptomatic lifelong heart issue. A stent inserted in early November. 

When I arrived last Friday afternoon, dad welcomed me in with a warm hug, and we dove straight into the tome of medical records he had collected in the last five months.

We are cardiology experts in a way that no two MBAs should be, so we looked at pictures of his arteries, pre- and post-stent. We gave a sigh of relief that our arch-nemesis artery, the Left Anterior Descending — the one that ended Mike’s life — was in no way involved with dad’s issue. We don’t need two widow-maker heart attacks in the family. Though the stroke still cut it pretty close. Without Gail, who knows if my dad would be alive, let alone moving, talking, hugging, eating deep dish like his regular self. 

A miracle, the docs had said. 

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Nothing like staring death in the face to work up an appetite. Thirty minutes later, he and I trudged out in the rain for pizza pickup, the puddles reflecting all the city lights — from car to Christmas — wrapping us in holiday warmth despite the damp chill. “Hold on a sec, Dad! I want to take a picture of you in front of the pizza joint. My Chicago friends will want to know what kind of deep dish we had.”

Mike’s passing (and this newsletter) have emboldened me. 

Which was good, because a conversation the old Sue could never have had now felt urgent.

It was the next morning and I had my father captive as he drove me to the airport.

“Dad, so do you feel different?” I began.

He did to me. In the 18 hours I had just spent with him, I had seen him tear up more than once, engage in personal conversations, and muse about the big questions of life. This is not the practical, stoic, reserved father I remember from my childhood, or even last year.

“Well, you know, when you guys were very little, I made a conscious choice to be as healthy as I could — running marathons, never smoking or drinking — so I would be around for the long haul. So many people in my family died young or had poor health. I didn’t want to do that to you kids. So I changed my habits for good and figured I would not have to worry about dying until after I was, well, at least 83! I’m just so surprised this happened when I have done everything right.”

Can’t argue with that.

It’s scary as hell to be faced with your mortality, especially when you’ve worked so hard to minimize it. It’s a terrifying reminder of how little control we have… But I didn’t see fear in him. I just felt more love. Openness. Connection.

“Dad, you may not see this yourself, but you seem to have a new appreciation for life.”

“Well, I’d agree with that,” he said after a moment’s thought. “But I still do have survivor's guilt. No one’s children should die before them.”

And Mike, although technically his son-in-law, was his child too.

Fathers want to protect their children from pain and suffering.

If the crazy logic of the universe had allowed for it, dad would have volunteered to trade places with Mike without a second thought. To minimize the loss for the kids and I, but also because that’s the natural order of things. Parents are supposed to die first. 

For years, I cursed the resulting guilt raincloud my dad seemed to be stuck under.

Back in 2020, for example, I had a podcast I really wanted my dad to listen to. It was my very first interview, and the very first question was about the moments that defined my upbringing.

I told the story of how, when we were little, my dad wanted all his kids to play sports. I was still too young for team endeavors, but my older sister was game and ready. There was no girl’s softball league in our town. So my dad did the logical thing (in his mind) — he strong-armed the boys’ Little League into allowing my sister to join. The other fathers were aghast. This was the early 70s and that sort of thing just wasn’t done. 

My dad was not a feminist or a women’s libber per se. He transcended any label. In a matter-of-fact way, he just believed opportunity was for everyone. He never once said, “You can do anything a man can do,” because it was just understood. We could do whatever we wanted to do, period. Gender wasn’t a factor.

Almost 50 years later I wanted my dad to hear me tell this story. To hear what an impact it had on my entire worldview, my success at work and life. 

But months went by and dad still hadn’t listened.

“Dad, do you need me to resend you the link?” I gracelessly prodded.

“No, I have it. I just need to get in the right frame of mind to listen,” he responded. 

“It’s not maudlin, I promise! It’s a very empowering interview,” I urged.

“I don’t doubt that. But I still suffer from survivor’s guilt sometimes,” he replied. I dropped the subject.

It was really hard to watch my dad carry that burden even when the kids and I were busy succeeding, evolving, turning our lives from a tragedy into a redemption story.

But now, he’s got his own redemption story to live out.

And it doesn’t matter that the guilt still weighs on him. Because that’s life — it’s never going to be all perfect, all happy, all sunshine and rainbows.

He only feels guilty because he loves the crap out of me and the kids, after all.

What surprises me most about loss, over and over again, is not the depth of despair that follows.

That’s expected.

But the sheer ferocity of the love that remains always knocks me off my feet.

Last weekend, I watched my dad be moved to speechlessness by acts of kindness, past and present. I feel him engaged even more deeply in caring for his children and grandchildren. We text frequently about how the kids and the Steelers are doing. He’s still up to his same 79-year-old routines, but with a new level of intention. He’s checked in when so many people his age are slipping out the back door.

Everyone says ‘I would die for you’ like it’s some heroic act, but in my estimation, living is harder. 

To live in the ongoing tragedy that is life and let it crack you open rather than shut you down. To allow hurt and pain to show you just how much you’d do anything for the people you hold dear. To become the most loving version of yourself because when you can’t control a damn thing, loving is all you’ve got.

I think dad lived the harder bargain compared to Mike. First, he had to watch me and the kids suffer without being able to make it better. Then, he got to live with knowing that no matter how much he cares, he can’t fix everything. And most recently, despite all the marathons and absolutely no vodka gimlets, he got whacked with a stroke that should’ve ended his life. He can’t put his faith in the future, even though he has worked so hard to secure it for himself and his family.

What’s left then?

A father who loves like there is no tomorrow.

With love for life,

Sue

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Midmorning Thanksgiving, I hit a wall. And it had all started out so well.

After an early-hours, empty-like-I-owned-the-place hike in Great Falls, I came home to a quiet house of sleeping college kids. It would be several hours before they emerged like bed-head bears from their darkened caves. Even more hours before my mom, sister, and brother-in-law arrived for Thanksgiving dinner. Not only did I have a great day ahead, I also got some time to myself?! Sitting down at my kitchen island with a cup of tea, I turned my baseball cap around backwards, tucking in to edit a TL post. 

Although cozy with love at having my babies around, I was also… rusty. Rusty at the family-at-home thing. Re-establishing a kid-focused routine took (more than) a minute. Doctor’s appointments. Christmas decorating. Flat-tire fixing. Car sharing. Grocery shopping. Calendar planning. 

The recalibration was also affecting my creativity. During a normal TL week, Leona gives me a prompt to fill out a too-thin section of my draft. I then bang out a spirited paragraph or two in response. But that morning, looking out my kitchen window at the birds flitting branch to branch, I had nothing. Nada. Zip.

I had no clue what else to say.

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Then, like clockwork, an old familiar feeling sprouted at the base of my neck. I rubbed my face as if trying to hide from it, but obviously you can’t hide from something inside of you. So the feeling began its slow wet arcs through my brain, leaving a slimy trail behind it. The slippery snake of self-doubt had arrived just in time for the holidays.

“Wait, if I can’t think of something else for this post, maybe I will not be able to think of ideas for any other posts… like… ever again. We’ve written 56 ideas… How will I possibly come up with anymore? OH GOD. I’m sunk.”

Leona worked her magic and pulled a rabbit (i.e. post) out of the hat.

But I was still shaken. And worried. While practicing what I preach and not chasing the feeling away like a pitchfork-armed mob, I didn’t want to linger in that state for too long either. I wanted to balance feeling my feels with some action. 

So I rummaged around in my mental toolkit for a move that would feel like a hand smashing a giant reset button.

Time for a visit to the National Gallery of Art. 

While the kids slept and Black Friday shoppers filled their physical and digital carts, I headed downtown. Timing my arrival with the Smithsonian’s 10am opening, I hightailed it early to take advantage of the uncrowded DC streets. Securing a rockstar parking space along Independence Ave, I tucked my coffee thermos into my tote bag and jaywalked across the empty asphalt.

Right away, I knew I had made the right decision. I could have sat on the bench in the East Wing mezzanine forever — the one where the giant Calder mobile floats. 

The soft light of that wide room, along with the surreal creature turning slowly within it — as if the entire room was actually 100ft under water — began to pull me into spaciousness… out of the tight grasp of the self-doubt snake.

But I was trying to not just press but SMASH the reset button. 

I wonder what the docents thought when they saw a middle-aged woman hurdle herself through the empty corridors into the “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” exhibit…

Rothko is known primarily for his ginormous color-block paintings on canvas, exhibited in museums throughout the world. 

I make a point of seeking these out wherever I travel. Though I’ve talked at length about how I feel underdeveloped creatively, these vibrating walls of color never cease to move me.

But the Rothkos of this exhibit were an eyebrow-raising surprise. Works no larger than a coffee-table book. Paintings of landscapes. Paintings of figures. Paintings of… I-haven’t-a-clue.

It completely blew apart my hidebound understanding of what a Rothko was. 

It also blew apart my fear that I’d never come up with another good post. 

Seeing the variety of Rothko’s work, it’s clear he never said, “Well, there’s nothing left to paint! Let me pack up my brushes and turpentine, sell my studio space and become a bus driver.” No, he just kept on exploring, changing, evolving what he created… because he was evolving himself. New ways of creating unfolded for him along the way, driven by his relentless compulsion to capture what it means to be human.

Less than 24 hours later I’m perched in the top of my treehouse, happily plowing through this draft.

The Rothko exhibit helped me see that a few days of muddled creativity and a loss in confidence were not the end of my creative journey. They were a stop along the way. One I will unwillingly but most certainly revisit many times in the years ahead. 

And during those stretches, I’ll look again for the “break glass in case of emergency” reset button, and not hesitate to smash the hell out of it.

If you’re anything like me, when you start to feel down, you have two contrasting inner dialogues.

One is unconsolable — oh god, I feel terrible. I’ll never feel good again. I’m a failure. How early is too early to go to bed… with a vodka gimlet.

The other is in denial — it’s no big deal, everyone relax, whatever you do don’t make a scene. Because you’re fine, you’re being dramatic, you have important things to take care of, just ignore it and stick with the plan.

Aka, don’t smash the glass. 

Yes, it feels a little dramatic, but I’ve learned to always smash the glass. To rummage armpit-deep through my Mary Poppins bag of (healthy) coping mechanisms for the one that will turn my day around. Because even if I have to get up an extra hour early, it’s worth it.

I’ve been to the abyss enough, I don’t need to wait to see if it’s really “that bad.” It’s bad enough, and I have vibrant living to get to!

I don’t reach for my reset button as a way of hiding from my hard times.

Rather, it’s a way of getting just enough distance from the crunchy feeling that I can reflect on it. I’m still in a boat amidst the storm, but I’m no longer drowning in the waves.

That way I can look around and remember:

* How many times I’ve been convinced that I’m well and truly screwed… but somehow made it out.

* How many supports I have at my fingertips — family, friends, nature, sci-fi movies, half-joking cursing-the-heavens text messages with Julie, etc.

* How many times I’ve discovered that, with these supports, I’m capable of far more than I realized.

* And finally, why I still trust the mystery even after all I’ve been through.

Hand glued to the reset button,

Sue

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Last week I was interviewed for the Women in Leadership Podcast. 

Host Angie Mezzetti, a lovely sprite of a woman with a lilting Irish accent and a masterful interview style, ran me through a gamut of topics in 30 quick minutes: How leading the kids taught me to be a better leader at work. How to move on from the physical objects tied to our no-longer-here loved ones. The power of ritual. The building blocks of resilience. (You can listen to the full podcast here.)

The interview closed with a rapid-fire round of five questions. What are my favorite pearls of wisdom? My thoughts on sustainability? The best bit of financial advice I’ve ever received?

And then the last question: What is your go-to song that energizes and motivates you?

“That’s easy! Even before The Barbie Movie craze, it was ‘Closer to Fine’ by the Indigo Girls.”

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

My affinity for this ear worm reaches back three decades. 

I can’t pinpoint the exact day it came into my life… Like a sense of deja vu, it feels like it's always been there.

Whenever it was, "Closer to Fine" hooked me with its bold message:

The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.

In the first sentient decades of my life, I was a seeker of the right answer — or the definitive, as the Indigo Girls sing. If I could only find that sure-to-exist right answer, I could ensure my life was headed in the sure-to-exist right direction. 

Its litany of locales where ‘right’ answers might be found — I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains, I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains — felt like the many fruitless searches I’d already undertaken in my young life. But I was stubborn. Neither the failed searches nor lyrics of the song could talk me out of my certainty that just around the next corner, I would find my ironclad definitive.

Oh, to be so young and so sure.

Even on October 18th, 1998, I remember singing my heart out to Track #1 on the Indigo Girls CD as I bopped down I-395 to a hotel in Arlington. I was meeting my bridesmaids to get ready for The Big Day.

Maybe I just wanted a catchy chorus and familiar words to sing along to, drowning out some wedding day stress? 

Or maybe I could see into my own future in ways I can’t explain?

Eighteen years later, "Closer to Fine" took on an entirely new meaning in my life…

After Mike died, ‘fine’ seemed like an aspirational state I would never achieve. I was as likely to become the $1B Powerball winner or be selected for the first manned space flight to Mars. 

By then the song was available to me with the swipe of a finger. I added it to a seven-song playlist entitled ‘Mikey’ weeks after his death.

In the stanza, I’m trying to tell you something ‘bout my life. Maybe give me insight between black and white, I found encouragement to open — to share my pain with my friends and allow them to help me puzzle through my thorniest moments.

In the refrain, the best thing you’ve ever done for me, is to help me take my life less seriously. It’s only life after all, I was able to see that laughing again, amidst even the most tragic of circumstances, was not only acceptable but essential.

And then there are these words: 

There’s more than one answer to these questions, pointing me in a crooked line. 

I had sang along to them so many times before. I had used that phrase — “more than one answer” — often. 

But now the question before me was so much bigger. Could I side-step the answers that society was giving me and be willing to walk into the wilderness, searching not for answers, but for…? What? If ‘fine’ was not the destination but a byproduct of not searching for it, what was I actually looking for? Didn’t matter. Could I just search, letting my intuition guide me toward some mythical land that an 80s hit had promised me existed?

Spoiler alert: yes. Grief, after crushing me, liberated me to try anything and everything.

Ok, I realize what I’m doing here (yet again).

Beating my surrender-to-the-mystery drum. But is anyone listening? Is anyone willing to actually try it? All I am trying to do is destroy one of our fundamental human beliefs — that we can plan and control our lives, ensuring everything turns out fine… via a blog post.

As absurd and repetitive as it sounds, I’m sticking to it. Because there is something here.

The collective myth that promises green pastures to the end of our days as long as we stay on the right path, has three major flaws:

* You won’t ever find the right path because it doesn’t exist.

* Even if you somehow found said path, you’d get knocked off it before you made it near “happily ever after” (which also doesn’t exist).

* In chasing the mythological Right Answer, we miss our very real clues.

What makes your day better, every time you do it? What project or hobby makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning? How would you spend your time if should’s took the backseat and you focused your energy on getting the most out of life.

Oh no, not another self-help guru telling me to “follow my bliss”. That sort of advice is for people who don’t have bills.

When did we forget about nuance, people??

It’s not black or white; saving for the future or blowing the entire 401k on a trip to New Zealand; planning everything or planning nothing.

It’s about making your life work for you, rather than looking for someone else to tell you how to do it (me included!).

There are so many experts telling us the “right” way to care for our families, careers, health, futures. Believe me, I’m trying to read all the books, and am falling deeply behind. So let’s stop looking for the “right” way, and instead embrace the dance of exploring and revising and discovering our way.

Maybe it’s too mundane to make a good post, but I’m going to say it anyway.

There is no universal, one-size-fits-all, “right way” to win at the game of life.

We have to piece it together ourselves, little by little. Sample, distill, mix patterns, projects, purposes. Get super close to finding your sweet spot of fulfilled, satisfied, tired-but-in-a-good-way at the end of each day… And then start again. Because you’ve changed, so now you need a new method for the new you that woke up this morning.

The sooner you embrace this messy process, the sooner you might find you actually enjoy it. It’s like play but in a grown-up suit. Another small bonus: when we start finally tending the seeds of our true passions and interests, our life has a way of bursting into bloom.

In my own life, for example, I am currently exploring the paths of meaningful connection with my colleagues and team-members, being vulnerable in this newsletter, and working up a sweat surrounded by the trees of Great Falls. Naturally, my work family is tighter and more productive than it’s ever been, this newsletter continues to swell in subscribers, and both my cardiovascular and mental health are off the charts for a 55-year-old widow.

What brings me joy now is exploring the questions of life — what matters most to me; how can I live each day fully; what helps me enjoy my fleeting time — rather than getting a gold star for picking the right answer.

And in doing so, I find more of myself. Pieces that I cut off or ignored because I thought they weren’t the “right” way to be.

Maybe that’s the entire point of “Closer to Fine” — the truer we are to ourselves, the easier everything gets.

It makes sense; in the wilderness, you may not find the right answer. But you’ll discover what really matters… to you.

Getting lost on purpose,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #17: Mystery is my religion. We can’t escape chaos. But we can reframe it.

* #42: Made to heal. Practicing what I preach when faced with an empty nest.

* #46: It’s all possible now. Awakening to freedom at the top of the world.

* #48: Allowing reality to be on your side. Surrender, the hard way and the easy way.

* #51: Choosing the road less traveled. A life of your own is worth the unknown.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

I have always been an ‘observationist.’ (Thank you TL reader Stephen for giving me this great term in honor of his non-verbal son Scott after last week’s post!) 

Motivated by curiosity, sure, but also a desire to hold the world at arm’s length. To protect myself from feeling. To stay in the ivory tower of my head, my intellect, my imagination. High up on my observation perch, I could take it all in yet not be drawn in. I could do life on my own terms: locked down and under control. 

I filled my days with the activities that facilitated this self-containment — reading alone in my room, the distance events on the swim team (the 1650m was my fave), a career that promised financial self-reliance.

But when death darkened my door, my happy place — in my head — suddenly became a booby-trapped battlefield…

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

I have spent the last year trying to explain how I was able to pull myself out of the tarpit of grief.

I have successfully closed my hands around pieces of it:

* Letting my family and friends support me, when all I wanted to do was hide.

* Daring to believe I would feel something besides sadness one day.

* Surrendering to the loss so I could look forward rather than always backward.

* Taking everything way less seriously.

* Being inspired by my kids.

But I think the truth is that I, like most grievers, was looking for an escape. 

Time slows to a crawl in the early stages of grief. You have no hope of decreasing the pain you are in when nothing is moving, including the days on the calendar. 

You’ll do almost anything to get out of your own skin, own head, own life — even just for a few seconds. To forget who you are and what has happened long enough to take another breath and maybe another step.

I’m not saying this is the best strategy for thriving after loss (in fact, I argue the opposite here), but sometimes surviving is enough.

I call those early, blurry but endless days the acute phase of grief. Like the bitter season it’s so often compared to, all internal processes shut down during this time besides the most essential. But also like winter, this is when the seeds that carry our new hope will be buried by our old hopes, which have been torn from their branches and left to decay.

How do we find a way to nourish these seeds when we can barely breathe?

Looking back, I wasn’t thinking about any of that.

Rather, I was unconsciously seeking the comfort of my favorite hiding place: the observation tower.

But the previously safe space of my mind was unrecognizable. It was like looking through a horror-house kaleidoscope — shafts of too-bright light were shining around jagged edges, illuminating stark emptiness I wasn’t ready to see, and exposing shadows in the places where I had once felt so secure. 

It’s crazy the things our brains and hearts can come up with when our sanity is on the line.

I imagine the part of me that is The Observationist as a gangly blonde teen, binoculars hanging around her neck, a notepad tucked in her back pocket. You’ll notice first that this aspect of me is quiet. Second, she is curious. But dig deeper, and you’ll discover that both of these traits actually rest on a third — she values preservation of herself and her kin above all else. 

The Observationist within was willing to do whatever it took to save me and my kids, even if that meant doing what scared her most: drawing me out of my skin, rather than deeper into it.

And out there, I discovered things I’d never realized before. Truths of being human, being a social creature, being yet another organism on this planet:

* Looking outward at the leaves of Great Falls, I saw the piercing beauty of light cutting through the branches. I realized that while my pain was acute, glorious beauty still existed in the world, and I wanted to see it and feel it. 

* Looking outward at the kids, I watched them come up with strategies and tool kits to cope. I realized I could do the same in my own way.

* Looking outward at my family and friends, I watched them always be there to catch me when I fell. I realized I was not alone. 

* Looking outward at my work, I realized that because of my brokenness, I had new insights into the pain and challenges of others. I could impact their lives, help them think differently about themselves, and turn my pain into meaning.

By looking outward to escape the pain, I saw the normal, everyday things around me in a different way. 

Nothing about the world outside my skin had changed. Everything about the way I experienced it had. I could rest in that ‘radiance in dailiness’ and be utterly wowed by it, when before it was just like blahblahblah — boring, uninteresting, the farthest thing from eye-catching.

It brings tears to my eyes to realize that the medicine for my healing was right in front of me all along. I just had to change the lens. Well, the lens got changed for me. But I sure as hell leaned in. I started with seeing nature in a new way, then people in a new way, and finally myself in a new way. 

I realize some woman on the internet may not be able to affect your heart of hearts, but if I could, I would reach in and unlock your knowing of how accessible this is.

Personally, I had to have my guard ripped down like the scenery of a play on closing night to understand the beauty and help and healing that is everywhere. But do we all have to have our initiation into the mystery be so violent?

Could we find a way — without being borderline deranged by grief — to drink in, breathe in, bathe in the wonder that surrounds us?

Because even now, I am so connected to it. My synapses got rewired and those babies aren’t going back (thank god). Before, it was for solace. But now my connection with the majesty of earth and life and people and plants and kindness and hope and rays of light coming through the dirty window fills me with power.

Long story short, I did not make a conscious decision to move on with my life. 

Day after day, I looked around me for something to distract me. In doing so, I accidentally found myself surrounded by endless clues.

It wasn’t easy but I didn’t have to figure it out on my own. I just had to recognize all the ways that life, including the life within yours truly, was built to heal after loss.

In observation,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #6: The radiance in dailiness. Grief taught me to see the magic in the “ordinary”. Let me show you an easier way.

* #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.

* #17: Mystery is my religion. We can’t escape chaos. But we can reframe it.

* #31: Not all progress feels like progress. Sometimes it feels like limbo.

* #54: Making life out of death. Anniversary(s).

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

One year ago today, I was standing amidst my hanging suit blazers and crumpled-on-the-floor workout gear in my hotel room closet at the Kuwait Hilton, recording the very first Luminist post.

Seven years ago today, I was in my pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, holding the still-warm hand of my husband as he lay on a gurney in the Fairfax County hospital emergency room, watching a priest deliver last rites.

Amidst the marking of the worst day of my life, I am now marking one of the best. 

Beginning on the sixth anniversary of Mike’s death, week after week, without interruption or intermission, we’ve delivered a Luminist post.

The good and the bad now live together in one day for me — November 15th. 

Both/and, baby.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

I am roiling with emotion as I draft this anniversary post. 

Death anniversaries are a smothering, soul-draining affair. The kids and I agreed after year one that we’d cancel all future occurrences. Nice idea in theory, impossible in practice. 

For the past few days I’ve had that familiar moist pressure in the space behind my eyes, generating occasional breakthrough tears at random songs, sights, thoughts. Sometimes just a breeze or a bird chirping will do it.

In response, I’ve been practicing my subconscious distraction techniques: loading items in myriad online shopping carts and never buying. Watching esoteric train-wreck shows on Netflix that leave me more depleted than when I began (Robbie Williams anyone?). Mindless eating of every representative in the cheese family. 

Even before beginning this post, I was feeling wrung out like a dirty dishrag. 

Now that I’ve started in earnest, I’m typing with tears dripping down my cheeks and sliding under my chin. Tears of still-immense sorrow for what I’ve lost. Tears of longing for Mike. 

But there’s something different this year. Intermingling with my sorrow-filled tears are also tears of overwhelming gratitude at what The Luminist has brought to my life — the kind of gratitude that wrecks you because what you have received is so great that you can never repay it. All you can do is cry about it.

So my emotions oscillate like a child on a swing. Back and forth in giant swooping arcs. Screams of glee and of terror. I’m just never sure which is which.

Yep. It’s A LOT. 

I have to stop, pull my glasses up onto my head and wipe my damp face. I have to rest my head back against my pillow and pause. I have to breathe slowly, in and out.

Then I begin again, clicky-clacking away on my iPad keyboard. Because my pain has meaning now. It’s not the end of a story, it’s part of something bigger.

I don’t have to ignore my grief to get on with my life. It’s all woven together.

The last seven years have flown by…

So much has unfolded. The 11- and 13-year-olds sitting beside me, holding each hand at Mike’s funeral, have blossomed into crazy-amazing, following-their-dreams, out-of-the-nest young adults. I’ve grown into a senior leader who has the incomprehensible luck of creating deep connections with the humans around the globe who are my corporation’s lifeblood, learning from them, and then literally implementing the changes that make their lives better. I’ve dug into and fortified my existing relationships while also forging new ones — so My Person has been effectively replaced by dozens of special people. I’ve built a sanctuary for my family. 

I’ve read a few hundred books, hugged a few hundred trees, cried a few hundred (thousand) tears, laughed a few hundred belly laughs. 

And I’ve excavated me. Every day I understand myself a tiny bit better, plumbing my depths for answers to the questions that have come to define my life:

* How can we learn to accept that life inevitably includes loss?

* How does surviving loss empower us?

* How can we realize that we are never alone in our experiences?

* How can we integrate rather than fight against the human condition?

I am drafting this post in the early hours of the morning on a visit to Colgate. 

I’m tucked up in my warm little cottage bed as the light turns from blue black to a filmy gray. I just turned my head to the stand of pines outside my window to see… SNOW. 

“Oh my god, it’s f*****g snowing!” I shout out loud with the mouth of a sailor and the enthusiasm of a kid. I hop out of bed, feet touching the icy cold floor as I scurry to the window to take a quick video. 

“Good morning! Just a little snow today!” I say in a silly, sing-song voice while recording, then send it to my brother-in-law and BFF Richie who is camping two states away with my sister. 

“Now that is something!” he replies. “The Colgate brochure did say bring lots of winter clothes!”

A glorious snow shower amidst my tears. A dash of human connection with someone I love. A new day with my beloved son. A life ahead of me writing, speaking, teaching, preaching about the aliveness all of us can find both before and after loss.

My tears of sorrow oscillate once again to tears of awe with a dash of overwhelm and off-the-hook gratefulness.

Having run through a series of emotions like the musical scales Connor will sing while warming up for his a capella concert tonight, I return to a state of equilibrium. No feeling is final.

Grant me one last moment to be unapologetically sappy (for today).

Some of you knew Mike — knew how spectacular he was and how much he loved us. Some of you didn’t have the pleasure. 

But whether you think of him as the squeegee-wielding perfectionist, the loving dad with the kids snuggled on his lap, or the mystical, future-seeing husband who wrote a letter long before his death telling me to live my life fully and happily if anything ever happened to him… he lives on in every story I tell here at TL, every post you read, every moment that any of us live a little differently because of it. 

You’d think he was gone with the wind, but he’s here, gifting us all over and over again. His ripples are just getting wider. Thank you, dear reader, for helping me exponentialize the love my husband left on this planet.

Rest in peace, Mike Deagle. Thank you for all of it. 

In memoriam,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #2: Why I wouldn’t trade away the grief. While I would give anything to have my late husband back, my life is more vibrant, more meaningful, more miraculous thanks to the lessons of grief and loss.

* #25: Embracing my humanity (in the WSJ). Reclaiming the “unspeakable” aspects of existence.

* #28: Love is legacy enough. It’s never too late to live a life worth remembering.

* #36: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Harnessing the power of shared purpose to ignite your projects and passions.

* #46: It’s all possible now. Awakening to freedom at the top of the world.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Like a Vespa hooked up to a Tesla Supercharger, I’m buzzing with the high-voltage current of New Orleans. 

The remnants of Halloween are in the air, and the city’s creative wackiness is on full display. As I guffaw at the all-out decorations, I can’t help but feel some envy. The residents of New Orleans seem to have figured out the secret to fully embracing their creativity — something I still struggle to do.

Almost a year into this Luminist journey and I still cannot say I am creative or creating. I choke on those words. And a writer? Actually tell people that I am a writer?! Preposterous!

It’s so strange… I don’t have imposter syndrome in any other area of my life. I’m a badass female exec in a male-dominated industry and I love what I do, the mission we serve, and the people around me. I’m confident, powerful, and able to admit when I screw up. I’m not ‘impostering’ anything! I am 100% the real deal.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

And while sitting safely in my cushy corporate chair, I realize I have done some pretty creative things. I started a women’s summit at my company from scratch. I led the effort to re-name and re-brand my company after a merger, complete with annoying questions on fonts and color schemes. I even co-designed a gorgeous Treehouse with my architect Robert as a haven and nest for me and my little family. 

My inability to call myself creative is extra frustrating because this is now the third time I’ve attempted to bust through this imaginary wall.

(If you’re interested, you can read more about the creative act of simply living and the little heroism of creating).

Why am I so damn resistant to owning this undeniable fact — I’ve spent at least ten hours a week for 52 weeks writing.

And why do I care so much about me and creativity in the first place…?

I recently read a book I thought had nothing to do with creativity.

I picked up Look by Christian Madsbjerg because I’ve always been drawn to the act of observation. So much so that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I was young.

There I was, happily nodding along as Madsbjerg expounded on the benefits of observation — “all activity is meaningless if you don’t have an actual insight to guide your efforts” — when he whacked me with a curve ball.

“Insights are the necessary platform for any worthwhile invention or innovation. Once you begin to have insights, you immediately recognize that coming up with new ideas, technologies, or solutions has very little to do with creativity. Instead, everything starts with the insight, and what follows is logical and obvious given what an insight has revealed to you. Innovation and invention are possible — inevitable, really — once you arrive at an insight.”

Creativity isn’t magic, it’s just observation, hidden behind a curtain.

It has nothing to do with having a mysterious, highly-sought-after X factor. It’s not just for a select few, who were either born lucky or trained extensively. So it doesn’t really matter if I identify as “creative” or not. I still have the capacity. We all do.

For most of my adult life, I rarely thought about my own creativity.

It just didn’t seem applicable to my goals or my life. I have always loved art museums, but for me, creativity was purely a spectator sport.

Until a force like an avalanche thundering down a Rocky Mountain pass started vibrating through my body. A force based on the hard-earned insights I’d gained as a widow — there was more to life after loss! It could be vibrant and fulfilling! Holy cow, everyone needed to know this! The insight was a hot potato, and I had to find a way to pass it around.

Which reminds me of another major moment when I was forced to come up with creative solutions: when I found myself as a single parent to two grieving pre-teens. 

This probably shows how little I know about creativity, but I always thought it ended in some tangible piece of art: a painting, poem, song, play, dance performance, puppet show performed by eight-year-olds.

But maybe that’s defining art too narrowly.

Maybe the type of existence that I’m so in love with — which I describe with insufficient words like vibrant and technicolor and pulsing with aliveness — is actually best described as art too. It is, after all, thinking outside of the box to create something magnetic and immersive and moving… where there was only the raw material of “something has to change” before.

We love to look at impressive people around us and think, “I could never do that.”

That’s how I feel about the writers and painters and musicians that inspire me.

I’m just a regular earthling banging my head against an iPad while they’re superhuman aliens, exploring the Milky Way through the mystical act of creation. I could never.

But “othering” people we look up to — along with the work that they do — is selling both them and us short. They are regular earthlings too, they have just devoted a massive amount of time and effort to their craft. Their ability to create isn’t a superpower we could only dream of receiving, like an acceptance letter to Hogwarts.

But believing it is means that we, the normal people, don’t even try.

To some people, I might seem like a superhuman alien. I somehow got the X factor that allowed me to turn Mike’s death into a redemption story for myself and my family. Mere earthlings don’t have a chance at doing what I’ve done.

But I thought I was an earthling too! I was just stubborn and desperate enough to try anyway. To try when I didn’t even believe. To allow my observations to form my expectations, not the other way around. To look beyond the grief pit in my chest and learn from this world that continues, always continues, after endless loss. To imagine a new path, and then create a new path, rather than accepting the dismal one I was pointed down. (I’m going to go into more depth on this next Saturday!)

Turns out taking the mental leap from “this is just the way things are for me” to “oh the hell with it, I’m going to at least try to turn this boat around” is the hardest part.

Just because I don’t identify as a creative doesn’t mean I can’t create a weekly newsletter that has attracted almost 800 subscribers. And just because you don’t identify as [strong, resilient, empowered, fill in the blank], doesn’t mean you can’t do [strong, resilient, empowered, fill in the blank] things.

We just have to be crazy enough to try anyway.

Creative or not, here I go,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #20: An ode to the reader’s creative act. I don’t want an audience. I want a cohort of co-creators.

* #27: Exceeding your own expectations. How my grieving teenagers became my empowerment gurus.

* #32: I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. It’s time to rewrite, and rewire, the narrative of suffering and struggle.

* #46: It’s all possible now. Awakening to freedom at the top of the world.

* #51: Choosing the road less traveled. A life of your own is worth the unknown.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Last week at work, I got eviscerated. When I looked down to see how bad the damage was — if my guts were bleeding all over the floor — I realized that I was the one wielding the knife.

No one else.

Yep, the words came out of someone else’s mouth, but I was the one who transformed them into a blade and fricasseed myself. Self-inflicted wound all the way. WTF?

We live in a feedback-first society.

Rate your Amazon transaction, your Uber driver, your experience at the repair shop! Stay on the line for a one-minute survey! Fill out this comment card! 

You’d think with all this practice in the feedback cycle, we’d be awesome at receiving feedback too. Not so.

We can dish it out. But we can’t take it. 

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Just like talking about the hard things (death, anyone?), receiving feedback initiates our fight-or-flight instincts. When we hear it, it feels like we’ve done something wrong and are going to get shunned by our tribe. It’s only a matter of time until we’re wandering the savannah without food or water, trying to stay upwind of the pride of lions on the horizon. 

This instinctive emotional response stops us in our tracks, covering our ears with the noise-canceling headphones of embarrassment, shame, or anger, driving us into the echo chamber of our own mind. Then we do a flaily dance in our brain, either punching back — “they're so wrong!” — or slinking away to lick our wounds and ruminate on how truly awful we are. 

In either case, we completely miss the point of the feedback: to help us get better.

For example, if I heard, “you interrupt too much in meetings”, I’d automatically think, “oh, they think I am a terrible person” and start my descent into a sympathetic nervous system self-flagellation. When in reality, they just think I interrupt too much in meetings!

And they’re probably not the only person who thinks that. They’re just the one brave enough to let me know.

I want to be a champion of feedback. 

I’m already a champion of self-help. On the level of logic, the only difference between this and feedback is the source.

So in theory, I could take feedback from others with the same enthusiasm I consume Brené Brown’s podcast — applying it like a surgical scalpel to cut out the boneheaded things I do so I can forge ahead as a better team member, better leader, better mom. But logic is a sandcastle compared to the ocean of emotions. One shame wave and my best intentions are a soggy, formless lump, if anything is left at all.

You’d think after seven years of grief, feedback wouldn’t even be a pinprick to my thick widow skin. I certainly had hoped so… 

We expect our evolution in life to be linear: the more we go through, the stronger we are; the more tragedy we face, the less we sweat the small stuff; the greater the obstacles we’ve overcome, the more even-keeled we can remain.

Sometimes, but not all the time.

Yes, we’ve mostly learned how to “ride the waves” of our emotions. But even the best surfer falls off their board from time to time. Sooner or later, we will be sucked into a whirlpool of emotion that makes it hard to breathe. In that moment, instead of berating ourselves for yet another “mistake”, how quickly can we pivot our reaction?

When receiving feedback specifically, how soon can we shake off the defensiveness? Drop the knife aimed at our own innards? Laugh and relax, even while our cheeks burn with shame?

The problem isn’t that we lost our balance and ended up soaked. That was inevitable. The problem is that we have no compassion for ourselves when we do.

No feeling is final, as Rilke says.

So how can we let the shame flow through and out of us without unilaterally appointing ourselves as our own judge, jury, and executioner for being human and fallible? 

We’ve challenged our emotional reactions at TL before — consoling when we want to run away, allowing ourselves to grieve when we want to avoid, stepping out of our comfort zone when we want to lock down, freeing our physical reactions when we want to disconnect and bypass. I’ve even posited that we use melodramatic movies and books to experience and thus release pent-up emotions. 

And yet this topic is harder for me. Because while grief is a b***h and fear is a doozy, shame is a double-edged sword. No other emotion causes us to turn the knife on ourselves in quite the same way.

But I think it also teaches us compassion and acceptance like no other emotion can:

* How to not run away from a simple conversation.

* How to breathe into the discomfort when you want to both attack your feedback-giver and yourself.

* How to sit in the hard stuff of life without numbing, avoiding, or any of the other ways we make ourselves and our lives less vibrant.

If we can do this, think of what else we can do.

Embracing feedback,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #22: The resilience experiment. If you can learn from “failure” without self-judgment, you can be resilient.

* #24: Skin in the game. Relying on our senses to get us out of our head and into our lives.

* #29: Learning from laughter to trust my tears. When we feel, we heal.

* #33: It’s okay to be afraid. Allowing fear to live, but not to rule.

* #49: How to console when you’d rather run away. A new way of relating with our discomfort around death and grief.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Two years ago, my son was at a crossroads. Connor was deciding which college to attend: William & Mary, his dad’s alma mater, or Colgate, the relative unknown.

We’d spent countless hours strolling through W&M’s leafy trees and colonial Williamsburg setting over the decades. We’d taken pictures of the kids in the faux stockades, eaten at The Cheese Shop more times than I could count, and watched Mike’s face light up as he told stories of his college days. His deep affection for W&M — and how it had transformed his life — permeated our family story. And since Mike died seven years ago, visiting that campus always felt like giving him a hug.

Colgate was a blank slate. Thrown onto Connor’s list by his college counselor, we’d visited just prior to the pandemic. Other than a few hours of frozen fingertips and hat head during a February tour, we were clueless. Tabula rasa, baby. 

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Connor had just over a week to choose.

“I think I need to make this decision by feel,” said my notoriously data-driven and risk-averse son. Wide-eyed with surprise, I silently nodded. 

“We’ll do a blitzkrieg visit to both,” I offered.

That mid-April Saturday, we folded ourselves into his Subaru at the crack of dawn and took the six hour drive north to Colgate. One stop at the Scranton IHOP for chicken and waffles with strawberry syrup, and countless songs on his playlist later, we pulled into the empty visitor’s center parking lot. 

No official tour, just a masked-up meander through the campus, sneaking into open buildings and walking the just-greening quads under bare-limbed trees. Like a transistor radio, we let the signals from the college permeate us, catching snippets of words, views, vibes. Connor rested his head back in the passenger seat as we headed home.

“Well, what do you think?” He said.

“Nope, buddy, this is not about what I think. This is 100% your call.” I replied.

“Well, let’s see how I feel after our W&M visit.” Then he was out like a light. I steered our little silver bullet home.

The following Tuesday, we got on the road for a much shorter drive down 95 South to Williamsburg, Virginia. 

By 9am we were walking the familiar paths of the W&M campus in its full-bloom spring glory, daffodils laid out like yellow carpets along the paths. 

Repeating our drill, we meandered through several buildings and the library, mostly in silence. Forty-five minutes in, we were headed into yet another historical brick hall when Connor turned and faced me, reaching down to put both hands on my shoulders and look me in the eye.

“Mom, what do you think?”

“Connor, we’ve been through this, it is not about what I think, it’s about what you feel. And we’ve been here less than an hour!” I replied, exasperated.

“Mom, no. Seriously. You need to tell me right now. Where do you think I should go?”

With his shoulders back and his gaze boring into me like a laser beam, I could tell he’d decided. I just didn’t know what that decision was. 

“Ok, Connor. I give up. I think you should go to Colgate.”

A look of shock enveloped his handsome face. Followed by a carbon copy of his father’s megawatt smile. Then he picked me up in a huge bear hug and swung me around. 

“I thought I was going to have to fight you for it!” He exclaimed. “I’m going to Colgate!”

Fast forward to last weekend. 

Connor and I are eating pizza at an airbnb a mile away from the Colgate campus. I came to cheer him on during a frisbee tournament and stayed to breathe in the autumn leaves.

Between bites, Connor mused, “Can you believe we made the choice to go to Colgate all those years ago?” And I I told him I absolutely remembered it, but I think his point was, “Look where we are now! Whoa!”

Connor is crushing it at Colgate. I’m impressed by the way he both trusted his gut when deciding, and then fully leaned into the decision once he had made it. He’s not daydreaming about how the grass could be greener at W&M. He’s at Colgate, and he’ll grow the damn grass himself if he needs to.

I’m enamored watching my son step so fully into life. As much as I talk about making the most out of our time on this random space rock, my kids continue to teach me how to do it better. 

In this case specifically, how to not let my age and apparent responsibility get in the way of living as vibrantly as I can.

When we are young, decisions feel like they are ours.

It’s about what we want in the moment and how far we dare to dream into the future.

But as we get older, it feels less and less like we are making decisions for ourselves. Rather, we’re making them for our kids, spouse, job, lifestyle, aging parents, etc. And if we don’t choose wisely, we won’t be able to support our kids, spouse, job, lifestyle, aging parents, etc.

Cue sleepless nights, worrying about which road to take. Kids have the boogeyman under the bed, adults have big decisions. Dress up as that for your Halloween party.

Choice is supposed to empower us, but the older we get and the higher the responsibilities pile, the more it drains us instead.

It’s the exact opposite of watching Connor on his post-choice path, running full speed ahead like a bank robber with a sack of cash tearing down the street. 

Yes, the stakes are higher as we age. But we interpret this as a reason to play the small game: Don’t risk it! Don’t make the out-of-norm choice! Shun those who do… (Are they dangerous or do they just make us jealous? Don’t think too much about it!)

We get so focused on what we have to lose. We make the “safe” choice. But life isn’t safe. We can try to make it more so, but it rapidly becomes a case of diminishing returns. Connor didn’t make the safe choice, he made the bold choice. He chose to have more room to grow into himself, rather than living in the shadow of Mike… even if that shadow would have offered comfort and nostalgia. 

I’ve written before about the little heroism required to live your life, rather than someone else’s. 

Even if that prescribed life seems happy from the outside, I think we simply crave more than a paint-by-numbers existence.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

Watching Connor erupt into the best version of himself in these last two years is confirming my suspicion. “Getting by” just isn’t enough. We need to see who we can become and what we’re truly capable of. We weren’t given life to be a lemming. We choose life to feel alive.

And being slightly scared is part of being alive. It’s why (in my humble opinion), Robert Frost took the road less traveled. And it's why even the most impeccable pro/con list doesn’t lead to a good life. We need to feel like we’re living a little on the wild side…

Which is just a fun way of saying that our choices — and the life they design — must be true to each of us. Maybe we can’t even explain why we want to go that way instead of this. Doesn’t matter. It’s our life. 

This requires, above all else, faith in oneself. Faith in our decision-making skills? Well, kinda. But more faith that we’ll make the best choice we can with the never-complete information we have. And then we’ll embrace that path and make the most of it. Because even if it wasn’t the best choice (which we’ll never really know amidst the endless, multilayered, domino line of life anyway!), now we get the challenge of turning it into something grand.

And, let me tell you, from the glimpses I’ve gotten, it can be so very grand.

The reality is that some choices are ours, some are not.

But what we make of them always is.

I tell people about my escapades since losing Mike — solo trip to Patagonia for my 50th, empty-nester world tour with Greenland glaciers, blah blah blah — and they look at me with… well, I don’t know what. Awe? Fear? Who cares. Because I get to look back at the last seven years and think, “Damn. I miss Mike, but what a vibrant life.”

When my world got blown up by loss, one option was to lock down, bolt the doors, stave off any further pain. The other path, the road less traveled, was to blow the doors off my current life. What’s the worst that can happen? Oh, hell, it already did.

And really, if anyone has a right to play small, it’s Connor. His dad died. But he doesn’t. He shouted down the worry and anxiety that plagued his young life, then yelled WATCH THIS as he launched himself into the unknown. 

Next stop for Connor? New Zealand for his spring semester. We just finished filling out his paperwork last weekend. And you can bet your ass I plan on visiting him there.

Play it safe or see the world? Seems like a no-brainer.

Full steam ahead,

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #3: What are we actually afraid of? Why dissecting our fears around death & dying is key to living a better life.

* #27: Exceeding your own expectations. How my grieving teenagers became empowerment gurus.

* #33: It’s okay to be afraid. Allowing fear to live, but not to rule.

* #44: You can’t go home again. Side-stepping nostalgia to love what is.

* #48: Allowing reality to be on your side. Surrender, the hard way and the easy way.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

“Emergency contact?” The front-desk clerk at the surgery center looked down at my paperwork, seeing a blank amidst the filled-in boxes.

Not that terribly long ago, that simple question made me cry. 

Fellow widows and widowers, even divorcees and singletons, you know what I’m talking about. 

When we take an exercise class at a new studio, see a doctor for the first time, go zip-lining or go-kart racing — or in this particular case, have foot surgery — the emergency contact box is there, staring us down. A space as vast and white and impassable as a Greenland glacier. 

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

But seven years after initially experiencing the heartbreaking indignity of this seemingly innocuous question, it has lost its sting. 

“Oh, sorry, it's my brother-in-law Richie. He’ll be here to pick me up,” I responded.

Forty-eight hours post-foot surgery, I was snuggled into my gray fuzzy sectional at the treehouse. 

Richie had taken the instructions from the surgeon, wheeled me out to his Jeep, and deposited me safely at home. “I’ll call you tonight, sis!” he chirped as he left. “And I’ll be back tomorrow for a check-in.”

Surrendering to couch-potato-dom, I popped open Netflix and tediously typed in the search bar: Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. In case you’re not hip to longevity science, blue zones are regions around the world where people consistently live to be 100 or older. And there’s nothing like surgery to get you thinking about living longer.

So over the next few hours, I giggled at white-hairs’ jokes and patted my own back for having most of the blue zone characteristics already. Community. Laughter. Purpose. A decent diet. A good amount of (pre-foot-surgery) walking. 

Essentially, I was lulled into a false sense of security by this feel-good show… when the second-to-last episode dropped a bomb on me: those with partners live longer lives.

And there I was, sitting in my treehouse alone.

Oh dammit, Mike! You are supposed to be here still to help me live longer! 

Bring in the black balloons and spoiled cake. Cue my personal pity party.

I mean, what the heck?! I’m supposed to HAVE a partner. I HAD a partner. Everyone else HAS a partner. What the f—

Interrupting my anti-celebration, a muffled buzz came from the seam in the couch. I squeezed my hand between the cushions, extracting my phone. A text message lit up the screen.

It was my beloved 82-year-old Uncle Joe in Houston. Joe is technically Mike’s uncle. But we’ve been thick as thieves since I passed the first family initiation test: not running away screaming when introduced to this raucous and rowdy side of the family way back in 1995. One of my favorite photos from my wedding is Joe and I cutting a rug. 

Fast forward to 2023, and out of the blue Joe was texting me,

“Sue, I can’t help thinking about the beautiful home you built on your own. What a great independent futuristic undertaking. Love you for the person you are. Keep it going. Love and admiration.

“As an old guy I know you have a great future.

“You will make a difference.”

Thanks Universe and Uncle Joe! I needed that. 

Like a rabid bingo player, I want to check all the boxes in the blue zone.

I seek out hillier terrain to challenge myself, better food to nourish myself, more community to enrich myself, new opportunities to laugh at myself. I enjoy pushing myself this way — in order to live longer, to enjoy my time on earth more, and to make the biggest impact I can while here. 

In other words, I generally appreciate any guidance about how to get more out of life. But I reacted to the partner insight (which was literally ten minutes in a four-hour series) like a child having a meltdown.

I felt like I was getting scolded for doing life wrong.

Because here’s the honest truth. I don’t miss having a partner. I miss having Mike. 

I have little interest in dating. My time alone is precious. My dedication to the kids remains paramount. And The Luminist is my passion.

So am I missing out on something life-giving by no longer having a partner? Or are partners just the most common source of many essential blue zone nutrients — support, kinship, affection, and companionship?

The last episode of Live to 100 made the answer obvious. 

In the final montage of smiley, wizened faces were many widowed elders surrounded by their families, groups of decades-old friends connecting over cards, clusters of two or three tiny grannies climbing ever-upward in their hill villages, and grey-haired volunteers working slowly but surely to help others in their community.

Here’s the secret I think I’ve been keeping from myself…

While I was railing against my early widowhood because of what partnership could have (and should have!) done for me, I was missing the larger, blue zone perspective. 

As social creatures we need connection, both to live longer and to enjoy life more. When we expand our concern beyond our own skin to include family, friends, and community, life gains meaning — meaning that is surprisingly more powerful than straight self-interest. 

Life gets dull if all we care about is ourselves. 

It’s what we do for others, as part of a community, that gives us good reason to get out of bed in the morning… even after a hundred years.

In other words, longevity is a symptom of being part of an interconnected web. Often this web centers around a partner and kids, but it doesn’t have to. Richie picking me up from the surgery center. Uncle Joe sharing his love via text. Mike and my other work friends making our company feel like a family.

And well beyond this. I receive daily reminders of the community I have unwittingly built to fill the spaces a partner used to consume. 

The spritely lady at the dry cleaner who has assured me, “You’ll pick up men’s shirts again some day!” Barista Kristina at my favorite coffee shop who writes my name on the cortado cup with a little heart next to it every single time. Retired Marine Mike who swims in the rec center lane next to me at 6am, and always offers to come help with anything I need because his mom was a widow too.

There is not one singular kind of human interaction that helps us thrive. There are myriad kinds. The blue zone centenarians made me see my gap…and also see what I’ve made of it. The mosaic I have formed from the colorful pieces of love across all the areas of my life is a worthy work of art.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.

This is one of the greatest lessons loss has ever given me.

Sooner or later, something essential in our life is going to shatter — broken into a million pieces so that we can never put it back together again.

Grieve the shattering, honor the void, mourn what was.

And when you’re ready, let the empty space become your blank canvas. Make art of your loss, meaning from your pain. Let the hole be generative. Be curious and open-minded about what blooms in its place.

Because life will surprise you with the wild and beautiful things it creates when you stop assuming you can only get certain things from certain sources.

That’s just not how love works. Love is bigger in every way than our expectations. My life is proof.

In connection, 

Sue

If you resonated with this post and want more, check out these:

* #12: How I became a heart-seeking missile (in a good way). The epic power of our hearts to take loss and turn it into even more love.

* #14: Things will be great again. Giving each other permission to believe in the future while honoring the pain of the present.

* #26: Wired to share (despite what our culture tells us). Seeking sanity between evolutionary instinct and modern impulse.

* #44: You can’t go home again. Side-stepping nostalgia to love what is.

* #48: Allowing reality to be on your side. Surrender, the hard way and the easy way.

> Subscribe to have the Luminist delivered to your inbox every Saturday, in both written and audio format, at theluminist.substack.com.