Survive and Advance

Friday night, I put on my Lucky Orange Pants for the last time this season. I didn’t know it at the time, although I suppose I imagined it was a possibility. That is, after all, the nature of the post-season. Survive and advance or lose and go home. But truthfully there wasn’t a part of me that believed that Friday would be the end. No, I was intoxicated by the belief that this was the season Virginia was destined to win it all.

But this isn’t a post about basketball. It’s a post about love. About family. About hope.

I have always been the girl who believed, no matter the odds, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how loud the voice of caution rang in the back of my head. I believe that the good guy will always finish first. I believe that love always wins. I believe in the storybook ending.

An old friend once referred to it as innocence. He said it with a slight trace of pity, as if I just didn’t know better. I worry that it will break your heart one day, he said.

And it did. Though not in the way he expected.

It was a doctor who stood in a hospital corridor, looked in my eyes which were begging him to tell me the impossible, and said softly, There was nothing more we could do.

That does something to a person. It did something to me.

I am not talking about the obvious ways you would expect to be changed by the death of a parent or affected by witnessing a trauma instead of just hearing about it. No, I mean the way in which your psyche is fundamentally altered when you have spent the currency of every last hope, every prayer, and every last dream believing in a miracle that does not come.

That is what it feels like to have your heart break.

And in that moment what you need is something to believe in again.

For better or worse, since my dad died, I have placed the full force of my love, the weight of my grief, and the survival of my last shred of hope on the Virginia basketball team. I wore that team like a mantle upon my neck the way my son wears his blanket like a superhero’s cape. They gave me an outlet for all the emotions like joy and hope that seemed to have no place in my new life and, in losing, a conduit to grieve all that I had lost. More than that, they gave me a bridge between my past and my present – a communion of the love that was born on my father’s lap 36 years ago and now courses through the veins of my boys.

And the truth is, in my heart I believed – I really believed – that somehow winning a national championship would be the final victorious chapter in my storybook of grief. A heavenly sign from my dad that I had survived and advanced.

But as the clock ticked down on the greatest upset in college basketball history, I knew there would be no storybook ending.

And when that happens, you can let the loss define you. You can dwell in the misery of wondering what might have been. You can equate falling with failure. You can give up on the storybook ending.

Or…

Or you can remember that success is not measured by a day. That life doesn’t always go according to plan. That loss is an outcome, not the end.

The truth is, sometimes the greatest success is getting back up after we have been knocked down and having the courage to believe one more time. And I would rather be the girl who believes in everything, even if it breaks my heart, than the girl who believes in nothing.

We fall and we get back up and we do it again. And again. And again. Because for every thousand times we fall, there is one where we fly.

Because we remember that falling hard is the price we pay for loving hard.

Friday night at midnight – after we got back to the hotel, after the tears had subsided – the boys decided we should send a text to Coach Ron. Even in their own grief, they knew someone else was hurting more. This is what they asked me to write:

“We know it might not help but we love you and we’re proud of you. You had the greatest season in ACC history. We were here with you tonight and we always will be.”

And for the first time that night, I cried.

Because that’s what real love is, isn’t it? Caring about someone else more than ourself. Allowing ourselves to celebrate the good in the midst of the bad. Knowing that even when we don’t have the answers, sometimes all we need to do is reach out our hand and say “I am here with you. And I always will be.” Believing when it is hard to believe.

This isn’t a post about basketball. It’s a post about love. About hope. About family.

Because even when we lose, we survive and advance.
#LoveHard
#Wahoowa
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