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

by Catherine Burns

“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.”

And so here I am seven years later. I’m a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of 7 billion. In any objective accounting of the universe, I’m practically nothing, and soon I’ll cease to be. But the certainty of my own demise, the certainty of my own death, somehow makes my life more meaningful, and I think that is as it should be.

“We all fall, and it matters. But when the fall is all you have left, it matters a great deal.”

Later that night, as I was sitting in my bedroom working on a very masculine scrapbook, Patti stood in my doorway, and she said, “Kevin, my entire life I’ve been saving for the future. The future’s now, isn’t it?”

I walked out of that house different from how I walked in, and I truly believe it was for my betterment, because I got to see Patti face her fears and conquer them. She showed me beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter how much the chips may be stacked against you, there is a way to hold your head high. Because when the fall was all she had left, she did it on her terms, because it mattered a great deal.

Look, the minute you let other people start to define you, you are just giving away your power.”

I always think that if somebody could be like, “Okay, you can come back, but you have to come back to that phone call where you’re fighting with Tig,” there would be zero fighting. It would be only I love you’s and I’m sorry’s from both of us.

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.

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.”

I’m having one of those special moments in life—that window between when you get a cool job and you can tell everyone about it but before you’ve started the job and you realize what the job is going to entail.

you can’t be afraid to put something out into the world that’s yours, something that’s totally different and that you believe in.

I said how much we loved her. That she was not our daughter by any claim of birth, but she was our daughter by every claim of love. How sometimes when you do what you think is a kind thing, like taking in a needy child, you can pat yourself on the back. But how we received far more than we ever gave. She was God’s gift to our family. I described how she’s buried on our farm, and when our family got together to try to think of what to put on her tombstone, we found this saying: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.”

I think forgiveness is possible, even for the worst among us. And I do believe we all need forgiveness, God knows.