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

by Catherine Burns

Honesty matters. Vulnerability matters. Being open about who you were at a moment in time when you were in a difficult or an impossible place matters more than anything.

There would be many more moon and stars talks over the years. And it was a beautiful thing, because I think what most of us would tell you now is that those talks forever changed the way we thought of ourselves. Those talks made us think that maybe there was a little more to us than we knew.

I so wanted to talk to them about the war while we were playing the game. I wanted to explain certain things, but I felt that if they knew about my background, they would no longer allow me to be a child. They would see me as an adult, and I was worried that they would fear me. My silence allowed me to experience things, to participate in my childhood, to do things I hadn’t been able to do as a child. It was only years later that they learned why I had won the game. But I wish I had been able to tell them early on, because I wanted them to understand how lucky they were to have a mother, a father, grandparents, siblings. People who annoyed them by caring about them so much and calling them all the time to make sure they were okay. I wanted to tell them that they were so lucky to have this naïve innocence about the world. I wanted them to understand that it was extremely lucky for them to only play pretend war and never have to do the real thing. And that their naïve innocence about the world was something for which I no longer had the capacity.

You can trust a human being with grief. That’s what I tell the wardens. I tell them, “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.”

There was a personal letter from a famous British philosopher confessing to Francis his abject fear when faced with the idea of his own mortality. The philosopher wrote, “I feel like an animal cornered, absolutely terrified, panicky, unable to think clearly when contemplating my own demise.”

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.

I find myself born into this universe. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a strange place. It’s also a scary and sometimes lonely place. And every day in my work, I try to discern through its noisy manifestation, its people, dogs, trees, mountains, stars—everything I love—I try to discern the eternal music of the spheres.

My lungs keep rejecting the oxygen over and over and over. It won’t go in. I have a full-blown panic attack in front of twenty Super-Nice Lutherans from Wisconsin, which is basically the worst thing that could ever happen to me. And I don’t even know when she came up to me, but all of a sudden I realize that Sharon’s hands are on my shoulders, and she says, “You’re okay. I’m right here. You’re okay.” Her strong hands were somehow keeping the lid on for me so something didn’t escape that I needed, like my sanity or the ability for my body and mind to be in the same place at the same time. She was so strong and calm and amazing, and everything I want people to think I am, and everything that I wasn’t in that moment. She was exactly what I needed.

When I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me that, because I am black, I will have to be twice as smart as the smartest white man in the room to get recognized half as much.

But my father raised me from a very young age to know it’s okay to be scared but not to ever be stupid.

They had a lovely backyard. It was stretched way back from the house. And I walked down the back garden, and the sun was shining, and I felt so good. I began to breathe in the fresh air and the colors and the greenery and hear the birds singing. Down at the bottom of the garden, there was an old, old apple tree. I went up to this apple tree, and I put my hand out, and I touched the bark of the tree, which was gnarled. I was thinking about this tree, which had been growing there for countless years, season in and season out. Every year producing its fruit, shedding its leaves, producing new leaves, and just carrying on its business in nature, oblivious of the big city around it. Oblivious of the hatred and the anger and the injustice and the wars, the depredation and the hunger and everything that goes on. Just simply being in nature. And I put my arms around that tree, and I wept.

You know, when we grow up, we all think we’re gonna get married, we’re gonna have our own family, and we’re gonna leave the other family behind—our siblings and our parents. But it doesn’t actually always occur that way. It’s very hard to break those ties from the first family that formed you.

And I looked in my friend’s eyes, and I realized how selfish I’d been. Because my child had been able to come to me, and say, “Mom, I think I’m gay,” and a week later, “No, really I’m transgender.” We were going through this amazing process of transition. And I got to be a part of it. We were going through that with a lot of love and care. I looked in my friend’s eyes, who had lost her daughter, and I realized that I really hadn’t lost my daughter. I’d lost a gender. A title. It was that easy.

When I walked into the recovery room after his surgery, he looked at me with this huge smile on his face. Then he looked down at his chest, bound for the last time, and looked at me again with just this incredible smile. He was so happy. And at that moment his breasts became warts to me, too, so insignificant and unimportant.

I told him the story. And he said, “Hasan, I’m mad at you.” I said, “Why? ’Cause I snuck out? ’Cause I lied to you?” He said, “No, because you didn’t forgive Bethany. “See, when I first emigrated from Aligarh, I was scared. I was scared of everything that America had to offer. I was afraid that you were gonna get caught up in the wrong crowds. I was afraid that you were gonna get into drugs, which is why I tried to protect you from everything. “And see, Bethany’s family, they were scared, too. They were scared of people that looked like us for whatever reason. And you were scared of me, and Bethany was scared of her parents. Everybody was scared of everybody. But, Hasan, you have to be brave, and the courage to do what’s right has to be greater than your fear of getting hurt.” There are days where I feel like I can forgive Bethany, and there are days where I feel like I can’t. I’m working on it. But I’m gonna try to be brave. I’m gonna be brave for me and Dad.

One night we’re sitting and we’re talking, and she’s laughing. She has just confessed to me that the hardest thing she ever had to do as a mother was to give me ipecac to induce vomiting, because when I was little, I accidentally ate a bunch of her asthma medicine. They were these little red-coated pills, and she could see the red in my mouth. And I have just confessed to her that actually I’d gotten into the cupboard and eaten Red Hots. It was the only candy in our house, ever, and we used it once a year to put two eyeballs on a gingerbread man that we made.

Finally it’s my turn. I go into her room, and I sit down on her bed, and I start rubbing her calves. I know that I should say I love her, and that I’ll miss her. And that in twenty-eight years I can throw her the best eighty-fifth-birthday party. Then, after that, maybe sometime we’ll explode in one big fireball, so that neither of us would ever have to experience what it’d be like for one of us to have to live without the other. But she knows all of that.

I loved that ring. That ring was me on his hand for two decades. That hand held our vows, and it was a beautiful hand. He was a writer, but he had worked for years before that in carpentry and construction, and he had these big, thickly muscled hands. It was a big ring on a big finger, and it had warped to his finger. And I loved the warp. The warp was our life together.

I gravitated to one woman in particular, and over the course of seven days, I told her everything. I told her I was afraid that we could never travel again, and that the baby wouldn’t love the beach the way I love the beach. I told her how I was afraid that I wasn’t doing enough for the baby and that I would never be able to do enough for her. And I was afraid that she would never appreciate the things that we do do for her and how ashamed I was about that feeling. She didn’t judge me. She didn’t say, “Well, at least…” or “It could be worse….” She just listened. She did point out that actually we had traveled—we were in Key West. And that it was on the beach, and the baby was loving the beach. She said that things were going to be however they were going to be—because of us and in spite of us. And that was such a relief to hear her say. She lifted a weight off my soul.

I couldn’t believe the beauty and the details that were awaiting us at Pluto. We would have never expected the unusual terrain we’ve seen. We saw a heart-shaped glacier made out of nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices. At the edge of the glacier there were huge mountains—mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains—made out of water ice. Pluto has a large moon named Charon, and on that moon there’s a deep canyon, deeper than the Grand Canyon. All these wonders awaited us.

His name was Ivan Simpson. He was born in a mental hospital. When he was eleven years old, his mother took him and his younger brother and little sister to a swimming pool, and declared that God was asking her to drown them because they were enemies of God. He and his little brother escaped, and he stood there while she drowned his little sister in front of him. He said he felt relief that his sister was not going to be tormented any longer. I couldn’t help thinking that here we are, the richest country the world has ever known—the most powerful. And there was no one for this little boy.