The Moth Presents: All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown

by Catherine Burns

“Do you have a report card to show that you had been in school?” I would say, “No, but I know I have been in school.” And then my mother would interject to explain the context. I would sit there thinking to myself, What do these school principals think? Do they really think that when there’s a war in your village or when your town is attacked, and people are gunned down in front of you, and you’re running for your life, you’re thinking to yourself, “You know, I must take my report card and put it in the back of my pocket.”

Mundane American tasks instead of thinking where people came from

And these kids were tough (they told me). Because they lived in a tough city, New York. And therefore they were tough. They had been to the Bronx. They had been to Bed-Stuy. They had taken the train there. They had gotten into fights and won. So they would say things to me like, “If you want to survive

Funny

I knew that the people who lived there didn’t glorify violence the way they did. They didn’t have time to pretend, because they lived in it, just like I had. I noticed that these kids had a sort of idea of violence that they’d never really lived. They glorified it in a way, because they’d never actually experienced it at all.

Big talking point

And that their naïve innocence about the world was something for which I no longer had the capacity.

But through Ron that had become my dream. And I’ve always wanted to thank Ron for sharing that with me and for making

“Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”

I’m sort of saddened by the loss of my belief in religion. It’s like leaving forever the comfort of your childhood home, suffused with the warm glows and fond memories. But I do believe we all have to grow up.

Maybe I’m not actually faking this. Or maybe we’re all faking this equally. And maybe I do know a couple of things. Like keep your sense of humor at all costs. Or embrace the absurdity of the situations in which you find yourself. Or even, realize that there are worse things than spending two hours trapped in a room with the person you love most in the world.

I mean, you could be in the basement of a Tower Records. Or listening to a slide show by Dr. Ferber. So with a sense of profound relief, I packed up my family. And for what felt like the first time in a very, very long time, we went home.

This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

I got the grant, and that was the beginning of the work that now, thirty-three years later, has become the story of inherited breast cancer and the beginning of the project that became BRCA1.

Amazing

My dad shows him his hand, and the judge puts a stamp in my dad’s hand and says, “Mr. Samadzai, I would like you to be the one to stamp your children’s papers.”

Tears

I wrote, “I want to be white.”

I knew I was hitting rock bottom when the anxiety started to affect me physically. I started to feel like I was having heart palpitations, and because I’m a neurotic hypochondriac, I was like, I’m dying. So I went to my doctor. I have a really good doctor, so he was immediately able to diagnose me as being an idiot.

But the thing is, what happened that summer: the world is always trying to tell you what you’re not. And it’s really up to you to say what you are.

It was an unbelievable moment, that I could have my arms around the man who murdered my daughter. I think forgiveness is possible, even for the worst among us. And I do believe we all need forgiveness, God knows.