Ward closed her Tulane address with these three spare words — a benediction that carried the weight of everything that came before. She had told the graduates about her grandmother whose schooling ended at thirteen, who spent decades laboring before finding stability at nearly fifty. She had told them about her own journey from Stanford to the Tommy Hilfiger outlet to the National Book Award. She had dismantled the fairy tale of the one perfect choice and replaced it with something harder and truer: a life of constant work, constant study, constant risk-taking, with no easy routes for people like her. And then, with radical simplicity: persist, be patient, be well.