The quiet work of rebuilding and remembering

Sometimes sadness just creeps in. All it takes is a word, a song, a sight. All it takes is a reminder of what was, of what I once had, of what I miss. This past Sunday, it hit me when I looked at a coconut tree on a backyard in Florida, where I’ve been spending a lot of my time these days. This coconut tree stands majestically amid a cluster of tropical trees, towering above them. I imagine it greeting the rising sun before any of the trees around it can see the sun. Before the sun reveals itself to me when I’m out early in the morning, sipping coffee while hearing the birds sing.

When I cup my hands just so, I can cradle this coconut tree, isolate everything around it and transport myself to a very specific place in the place I still call home even though I’ve lived in the United States longer than I lived there: the front porch of my parents’ beach house in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The beach house is as simple as a beach house ought to be. It has tiled floors that are easy to sweep and mop, a daily requirement; tiled floors that stay cool even when the hot, humid air clings to the skin like a straightjacket. It has an old refrigerator whose door needs a decisive push to stay closed and wooden doors that creak and stall as you open them to let in the more forgiving evening breeze. It has ceiling fans that whoosh all day, trying hard to make a difference.

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My parents bought this beach house 30 or so years ago and some of my fondest memories come from moments spent on the front porch by their side, against a backdrop of coconut trees that line grass and sand and stretch as far as the eye can see.

The coconut tree in Florida reminds me of that pretty much every time I look at it. Sometimes the memory is a passing thought. Often, it lingers, floods me with joy and gets me to share stories of my youth with the man beside me, morsels of background and context that help him make even more sense of who I am. On Sunday, it awakened saudade, that nostalgic longing for something that isn’t there — like my parents, like the lazy mornings on the porch that were a regular feature of my past.

Since death joined me, though uninvited and unwelcome, I’ve learned to embrace saudade and to let go of the sadness that follows it. Because if I miss the happiness of the past it means that I lived in happiness. And when I lean on that, it’s easier to see the happiness that surrounds me today, one that I’ve built piece by piece over a solid foundation that is a mash of all sorts of feelings and experiences, but that has been unquestionably built by me.

To lose — a place, a person, a treasured routine — is to be given an opportunity to start again. And starting again isn’t about forgetting. It’s about taking what you need from what you had and using it to sharpen your understanding and lend more significance to all that you have today. Thank you, Death, for teaching me this lesson.

To be sovereign is to be free to take action that creates our own version of happiness.

With love and purpose always,

Fernanda