A Life That Required Poetry

This week, I attended the funeral of a young woman who left far too soon. She was 39 years old—a wife, a mother of two, a sister to a friend I studied abroad with in college. Our families have been loosely connected for decades. Our dads went to high school together. The overlaps keep revealing themselves, as if to remind me how small the world really is.

I didn’t know her personally, which somehow made the service even more disarming. Her death came from a heart event—sudden and slow all at once, the kind of loss that refuses tidy explanations. And yet, what stayed with me wasn’t the mechanics of how she died, but the language people used to describe how she lived.

She was fierce and soft. She “won with grace and gloated only in private". She loved theater. She loved poetry—especially Walt Whitman. Her husband said he never fully understood the poetry himself, but he suspected that ordinary prose simply wasn’t elevated enough to match her life. Poetry, he said, was the only language spacious enough.

That line has been echoing in my head ever since.

In the days following the service, I’ve been thinking about this work—about how this kind of loss reframes the way we talk about our lives and our leadership. There’s comfort in remembering that we don’t have to get it perfect. We get to iterate. Learn. Revise. Try again. So much of life is lived in pencil.

And yet, we don’t get do-overs either.

We only get this draft.

That’s the paradox I keep coming back to—the same one I’ve been wrestling with in my leadership work. The need for both/and thinking. The refusal to flatten complex lives into clean binaries. Growth and patience. Confidence and humility. Urgency and restraint.

When I think about what they shared about this woman—someone I never met, but now feel quietly changed by—it was the both/and that felt most real. Fierce and soft. Grace and gloat. Joyful and serious about the life she was building. Those weren’t contradictions. They were evidence of a life fully lived.

The service didn’t feel like a performance of grief. It felt like a reckoning. A reminder that the goal isn’t perfection or polish. It’s presence. It’s choosing a life that, when spoken aloud, requires a language bigger than ordinary sentences.

We don’t get a second draft.

But we do get this one—unfinished, imperfect, and alive.