“Love, Loss, & The Power Of Saying Yes”

The Heart of the Story

When Reena Holmes boarded a month-long solo cruise from Miami to Buenos Aires, she wasn’t chasing luxury. She was chasing courage after losing the love of her life.

It was the stretch of the calendar she’d come to dread: her birthday, Valentine’s Day, and her late husband Floyd’s birthday, all packed into one month of memories. She told herself this trip would be a way to face them head-on.

“People asked if I would really sail alone for 32 days,” she said. “My answer was yes.”

What she didn’t know then was that the word yes would become her compass... and that two strangers on that ship would carry a piece of her story before they’d ever met.

The Journey

Back home in Arkansas, Reena worked her tail off to go from working other people’s farms to owning her own. She grew a family on that farm alongside her high-school crush Floyd — a man who “stood tall with a big heart.” 

But it was that big heart that would also plague Floyd. In 2019, he suffered three major cardiac events tied to hypertension and diabetes. The day he was scheduled for a kidney transplant, doctors rushed him into emergency heart surgery instead. He survived the surgery but passed six months later from another heart attack on what would have been his and Reena’s 29th anniversary.

Although devastated, Reena made a decision: grief would not be the end of her story.

At 57, she entered the Miss Arkansas beauty pageant, “half naked and afraid,” as she likes to joke, to honor Floyd and raise awareness about organ donation. She didn’t win. She didn’t even place. But she felt like a winner for putting herself out there.

The Turning Point

That courage became something bigger. Reena launched Soul Traveler: Say Yes To…, a storytelling platform celebrating organ donors, lucky recipients, and people learning to live again. By helping others heal, she was mending herself, too.

Then came the cruise. Before Reena left, one of her daughters teased, “You’re going to meet five people” — a premonition of purpose for the journey she was about to set out on.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Among them were Mike and Peggy, and later, George and Beverly. She learned that Mike had been a living kidney donor and that George had been the recipient of that kidney — the same kind of gift her husband never received.

“God reveals things when you’re ready,” she said.

The Ultimate Good

Now splitting her time between her Arkansas farm and the Caribbean, Reena carries the stories of Floyd, Mike, and George across oceans and into strangers’ lives. “They remind me that grief doesn’t end a story,” she said. “Sometimes it begins a new one.”

It’s a perspective gained by having the courage to rebuild. “This is about saying yes,” Reena said. “Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to dreams fear told you were too late to chase.”

Sometimes, a tragic loss is the start of finding yourself again.

Here’s a letter sent to the officers from one of our stories featured last week — “A Grocery Run That Saved A Family”

Send us your thoughts for a chance to be featured.
To do so, simply reply to this email or click the button below.

🫀 A health professional now performs open-heart surgery alongside the doctor who saved his life with the same procedure when he was a teen.

🛟 Lifeguards in San Diego rescue a non-compliant canine after getting swept away from shore.

🥁 A boy with Down Syndrome nails the “Whitney Houston Challenge.”

By the early 1990s, the AIDS epidemic had shaken the public for nearly a decade, leading to plenty of misinformation about how the disease was contracted and spread… ultimately isolating those who were diagnosed. But when Princess Diana of Wales visited an AIDS hospice in Toronto, Canada, during an official visit, she did what many thought was unthinkable — she shook hands with a patient without her gloves on. Doing so, she remarked, “HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it.”

Leave it to my friend Oprah to host a tricky conversation with grace and understanding. On her video podcast, she hosted a roundtable discussion on the topic of “going no contact” with a family member — something nearly one-third of Americans say they’ve done! She brought together experts, sons, daughters, and parents — people who had cut off communication with a relative, and those who’d been on the receiving end of the silence.

I was surprised to see Oprah catch some flak online. People were reacting to short clips (a sign of the times!) and missing the full context. But the full conversation was thoughtful — and, honestly, timely.

The conversation is eye-opening, deeply empathetic, and intellectually curious. And it’s just another reminder of how much I miss The Oprah Winfrey Show!