A week after I posted a tribute to my mom on Facebook, my phone lit up with one more comment.

I thought the initial wave had passed. Seventy reactions, thirty-seven comments—almost all of them from the first few days. Then a colleague wrote something that stopped my thumb mid-scroll.

She said she once asked her father about life everlasting. His answer was simple: it is the impact you leave on the world, the part that keeps going long after you have left this lifetime.

She added that my mother’s life fit his answer perfectly.

I read her message twice. Then I scrolled back to the top and read every single comment again.

Messages Across Two Languages and Oceans

The comments came in two languages. That felt deeply fitting, since my mom lived in one country and her son lives in two.

• From Brazil: “Amor de mãe não morre; fica marcado no coração.” (A mother’s love doesn’t die; it stays marked on the heart.)
• From family: A cousin wrote, “Tia Sônia, lembraremos para sempre.” (Aunt Sônia, we will remember you forever.)
• From close friends: Another friend wrote to my sister and me that what remains is saudade, that untranslatable Brazilian ache of missing someone, along with the memories and her beautiful smile.
• From the U.S.: Messages came from people who had never once sat at her table, saying, “A life lived. One we can all learn from.”

What Really Matters When the Journey Ends

Here is what I noticed during that second read-through: not one comment mentioned anything she owned.

No one brought up a house, a car, or a bank account. Every single comment was about who she was as a person and what she left behind inside other people.

This realization brought me back to something a late friend of our family used to say:

“Da vida só se leva a vida que a gente leva.”

English can’t quite pull off the same linguistic trick. In Portuguese, levar means both “to take” and “to lead.”

Translating the spirit of the phrase: from life, you only take the life you lead. What you carry out when you leave is exactly what you carried through while you were here.

My mom didn’t take anything physical with her. Yet somehow, she left with everything that mattered, because she had already handed it out, one person at a time, for decades.

It showed up clearly in a comment section, in two languages, a week after she was gone.

What Will People Write About You?

There is a famous Brazilian talk show host who always closed his interviews with the same question: “What would you like written on your tombstone?”

Nobody ever asked my mom that question. She didn’t need to answer it; thirty-seven people wrote it for her. Not about what she accumulated, but about how she lived and loved.

So I will pass that question along to you today, with one small edit:

Not just what you would like written, but what are you doing today that will put it there?

Warmly,

About Roger Magalhães

Entrepreneur | Speaker | Storyteller | Author
Different brands. Same high standard.

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Official Website: RogerMagalhaes.com
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