Hello Reader,

Welcome to the conversation.

No one gets out of this alive.

I know that sounds like the beginning of something dark. It isn’t. It’s the beginning of a reckoning, the kind that only comes when someone you knew, someone who had everything the world says should protect you, dies anyway.

Her name was Nancy Saustad. She was 61.

“ Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver

From My Chair to Yours

I’ve been in a season of grief. The particular kind of grief that comes from wanting something deeply, working for it, and watching it not happen. Yet.

I have shared bits of it here. Living it and processing it privately, wondering when the floor would feel solid again.

And then Sunday happened.

Nancy and I worked together at KERA. We were connected by more than the building. We were both members of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, though at different universities, and that shared thread was one of the things that made her feel like someone I already knew before I really knew her. She was warm that way. People were drawn to her because she made you feel like you mattered the moment you walked into the room.

She was part of a prominent Dallas family. She was educated at Hockaday and SMU. She raised over $100 million for KERA (North Texas Public Broadcasting) including helping secure a new headquarters at a moment when other public broadcasting stations were forced to make cuts. Before that, she helped bring the Giants of the Savanna habitat to the Dallas Zoo. Eleven acres of African landscape, right here in Dallas. She did that.

She had every resource, every connection, every credential. And on Sunday, she ran out of luck.

My mother used those exact words once “she ran out of luck” about someone else’s fate. They came back to me this week with new weight. Because the truth is, luck runs out for all of us. The container doesn’t protect you. The resume doesn’t protect you. The zip code doesn’t protect you.

And sitting with that, really sitting with it, I found myself on the other side of whatever I’ve been processing. Not because grief fixed me. But because perspective has a way of doing what nothing else can.

The Lens

Here’s what I know about depletion after years of working with this framework and, lately, living inside it: the exit isn’t always graceful. Sometimes you don’t crawl out. Sometimes something cracks the ceiling open from above and light just falls in.

Nancy’s death was that for me.

The Depletion to Fulfillment model asks a simple question: what are you actually choosing, beneath all the busyness, the striving, the survival? Not what you’re performing. What you’re choosing.

Nancy chose. Deeply and consistently. She chose David, and their three children, and her dogs, and skiing in Vail, and U2 and Elton John and Billy Joel. She chose the organizations her mother built. She chose the donors who gave more than she asked for, and she was in awe of them for it. She chose, as her husband said, to stop everything the moment her kids needed her, because even though she loved her work, mother was her first priority, always.

That is not a depleted life. That is a woman who knew what she was doing and did it on purpose.

I want to live like that. I’m choosing to live like that.

What are you choosing?

Reflection

Three questions to sit with this week:

• If you learned today that your time was more limited than you thought, what would you stop waiting for?
• Where in your life are you getting by when you could be getting busy?
• And who in your life deserves to hear, before luck runs out for any of us, that they mattered to you?

In Her Honor

In Nancy's honor, her family has asked that memorial contributions be made to KERA or to St. Philip’s School & Community Center.

To read Nancy’s full obituary as reported by KERA News, click here.

Until we see each other again, may you identify how you want to live "your one wild and precious life",
​

Joanna Douglas
Conscious Leadership Coach, Speaker, Teacher Founder of Enneagram Ensight