Heartbreak and Hope

Hey there. I’m Brad Shaw. My wife Mary and I have been full-time residents on Marco Island for almost two years, homeowners here for seven. We love calling Marco home.

This spring, I was having a beer at the Crabby Lady in Goodland with Scott Shook from the Coastal Breeze News, and he asked if I’d be interested in writing for the Breeze. My first reaction was, “What would I write about?”   Scott’s reply: “Whatever you want.”

Something about the conversation lodged in my brain, and on my morning walk the next day, the thought crept into my head that I could write about heartbreak and hope and do so on a fairly regular basis.

That must sound kind of strange… to write about two things on the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. What could they possibly have in common? People understand hope as a topic, but what about heartbreak? Why waste ink on that when the world is already filled with so much heartbreaking news?

Well, that’s kind of the point. I think the two do have a lot in common, and I think we need more of both, actually. Let me start with heartbreak since that’s probably the more complicated of the two.

In short, to have your heart broken – by anything or anyone – means you have a heart to begin with. And in my own experience, true heartbreak can lead directly to unbelievable hope.

When I retired in 2015 after 25 years in corporate communications, I started a podcast with my old boss, Frank Blake, the former CEO of Home Depot, who retired around the same time. The podcast is called Crazy Good Turns, and it tells stories about people who do amazing things for others. In addition to being a co-founder, I was the main writer and host. Frank’s family foundation funded the project. I volunteered my time and took no salary. I’m no longer involved, for reasons I’ll describe, but it’s still going strong with Frank as the host, and I hope you check it out wherever you listen to podcasts.

Most of the people we featured in the 40 episodes I produced were founders of nonprofits who are making a difference in the world. You might have heard of some of them, like Team Rubicon, which deploys veterans to disaster zones, or KaBOOM!, which builds playgrounds for kids in underserved communities.

But most of them were pretty small, and it’s likely you haven’t heard of them. We featured a middle-aged woman in Minneapolis who got her mechanic’s license so she could provide free car repairs to the working poor. We interviewed a mother of two children with Down Syndrome who opened a coffee shop in Savannah staffed entirely with people with intellectual disabilities. We even featured a guy in Las Vegas who spent most of his nights in the drainage tunnels under the city, helping the scores of homeless who live there. 

My point here is that pretty much every person I interviewed had their heart broken by some tragic thing they witnessed as they were just going about their lives. But unlike most of us, they didn’t avert their eyes from the tragedy in front of them. No. They embraced it, with the hopeful notion that they could actually do something to fix it. 

Keep in mind, these folks weren’t the rich philanthropists who typically make headlines writing massive checks to burnish their reputations. These were ordinary people like us, laboring in relative obscurity, often at great personal and financial expense. It was moving stuff and it left a mark on me.

I did this for about three years until my wife was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in April 2018. Thankfully, her prognosis is good, and she just notched her five-year, all-clear mark this April. But those of you who have dealt with cancer know too well the gut punch it throws, and I chose to step away from Crazy Good Turns to focus on our cancer journey and try to piece our lives back together.

A friend told me at the time that cancer is like a magnifying glass when it comes to a marriage. If you have a good marriage, it gets better. If you have a bad marriage… Well, you get the point. Thankfully, our marriage was strong and cancer only made it stronger. From this heartbreak, we’re both filled with hope because we feel like we can deal with pretty much anything now.

I’m a big believer now that heartbreak and hope go hand-in-hand with so much in life, including the world at large. If more people had their hearts truly broken by what they see around them – and there’s a lot to see on that front – we’d collectively take bigger steps to right those wrongs and fill people with hope through our actions. 

So, that’s what I plan to write about… individuals and groups who experience or witness some heartbreaking situation and instead of running from it, they embrace it with a hopeful optimism that things will get better if we all simply try to make it so. Please reach out to me if you know someone or some group that fits this bill.

I’m in my late fifties now, young to some of you, old to others. Regardless, I’m in the back half of my life, and with that comes some perspective that I think many of you may relate to. One of my favorite writers is Richard Rohr, who runs an organization called The Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. I’ve been reading his daily meditations for years, and always find his thoughts compelling, and one in particular has really resonated with me. He says, “Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense. There is still darkness in the second half of life – in fact maybe even more. But now there is a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety.”

Less anxiety amidst our darkness would be nice.