There is a cannon at Nationwide Arena. If you’ve never heard it, let me try to describe it — it is less a sound and more a physical event. It goes off every time the Columbus Blue Jackets score a goal, and it does not ask your permission. Your chest receives it before your ears do. The first time it happens, you flinch. By the fifth time, you lean in.
This team brings me so much joy. The kind that is uncomplicated and full and completely unreasonable. I am here for all of it.
My daughter Mia and I have made this our thing. Lower bowl seats. The roar of a crowd that is absolutely unreasonable about a sport played on ice. The way the players root for each other openly, visibly, without apology. Matthew Olivier starting a scrum or diving into a scrum he probably shouldn’t. The way this team, these last seasons, carry something heavier than a puck.
They carry Johnny.
Johnny Gaudreau — Johnny Hockey — was killed along with his brother Matthew in August 2024, struck by a drunk driver the night before their sister’s wedding. He was 31. He was beloved. He was the kind of player that made you love the game more, not just the team. And in these seasons after his passing the Blue Jackets have been playing with his number, the Four Nations Team hung his jersey in their locker room, the USA team brought his children out on the ice when they won gold – his memory, and the full weight of what it means to keep going after the kind of loss that doesn’t fit into any category you already have.
I watch them and I think: this is the &.
They grieve and they play. They lose and they show up tomorrow. They remember him and they score the goal anyway.
When I’m in that arena — or on my couch yelling at a television like Coach Bowness can hear me — I do not think about anything else. Not many places in my life offer that kind of siesta from thought. The world goes quiet. The & is all there is: the goal and the cannon and Mia grabbing my arm and the joy of being alive enough to feel all of it at once.
That’s what the & gives you. It doesn’t simplify. It expands. It makes room.
We live in an OR world. You have to be this or we can’t be friends. You have to believe this or we’re done. You have to choose a side, draw a line, plant a flag and defend it — or you’re suspect. The OR is everywhere. It’s exhausting. It flattens people into positions. It makes complexity into a threat.
But life — real life, the lived kind — has never actually worked that way.
I can disagree with you and love you.
I can be heartbroken and still be present.
I can hold a question and not need an answer yet.
I can believe God showed my son mercy and still wish he were here.
I can be grateful I got to be his mom and grieve that it ended too soon.
That last one is the hardest. And the truest.
This Friday, March 20, would have been my son Finn’s 20th birthday. Finn came to me at age 8 from Ukraine — he and his sisters, who were 7 and 11, became mine through adoption. He arrived already carrying things no child should carry.
Trauma with roots deep in a country being stolen from its people by a tyrant who decided their lives were his to take. Finn was funny and complicated and tender and hard to reach and so worth reaching for.
Finn died at 18 from an accidental fentanyl overdose. The weight he carried from Ukraine never lifted the way I prayed it would. Fentanyl got there before healing did. His life was so very hard, and he was beginning to make choices that would have made it harder still. I believe God looked at my boy — all of his pain, all of his history — and showed him mercy.
I believe that and I miss him every single day. This Friday, I will sit with that.
And on Saturday, I will be back in that arena. Friends and family all around me, the cannon doing what it does. The & made visible. Grief on Friday. Joy on Saturday. Both true. Both mine.
✦ PAUSE ✦
The OR is loud right now. Louder than usual, maybe. The world keeps asking you to choose — your side, your position, your allegiance — and it keeps asking faster than you can breathe.
What if you didn’t? What if, just for today, you let yourself hold two things at once without resolving them, or trying to make sense of them?
Where in your life are you being forced into an or — when what you actually need is an &?
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✦ SEE ✦
You’ve already been living the & — you just haven’t had a name for it. You’ve been grieving and showing up. Doubting and believing. Exhausted and still somehow full of love. Holding people you disagree with and not letting go.
Notice where you’ve already been choosing the & without anyone giving you permission. You’ve been doing this longer than you think.
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✦ BREATHE ✦
You do not have to resolve the tension to survive it. The & is not a problem to solve. It is a truer way to be. Some things were never meant to cancel each other out — they were meant to be held together, even when it’s hard, even when it’s heavy.
Breathe into both sides of what you’re carrying today. You don’t have to choose.
_______________________________
✦ GROW ✦
The & makes you larger. It stretches the places in you that OR has tried to shrink. When you let two true things exist at once — joy and sorrow, certainty and doubt, love and disagreement — you grow a capacity for people that the OR world simply cannot.
What becomes possible when you stop trying to choose — and start letting the & make room?
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Happy birthday, Finn. I carry you with me — not instead of joy, but alongside it. That’s the &. That’s all of it.
Let the & be enough for today.
With Big Hugs and So Much Love,
Stacy
Stacy Bergman
Founder and Head Coach, Brisalo
Always Rooting For You!
Brisalo Coaching & Wedding Services
Brisalo exists to help women stop performing for others and start trusting themselves. You’re receiving this because you signed up for The Gentle Pause. To unsubscribe please respond to this message and you will be removed, no questions asked.
Local Services: Columbus, Ohio + Global Services
March 15, 2026 | Brisalo | The Gentle Pause — Issue 06, 2026
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