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.

And once we hear each other’s stories we realize that the things we see as dividing us are, all too often, illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are in truth no thicker than scenery.

But the stories in this book show us that when we dare to face the unknown, we usually discover that we have more grit and tenacity than we thought. And we often land in a place that we couldn’t even have imagined when we started out.

But we look away at our own peril. For what wonders await us when we don’t turn away. Sometimes it is easier to try to make sense of the world one story at a time. And when we dare to listen, we remember that there is no “other,” there is only us, and what we have in common will always be greater than what separates us.

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.

You can trust a human being with grief.

“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.”

That was it. There was no doom and gloom. There was no gnashing of teeth. There were no tears. It impressed me immensely, this living embodiment of an ancient stoic dictum: accept what you can’t change.

“I feel like an animal cornered, absolutely terrified, panicky, unable to think clearly when contemplating my own demise.”

“Everything that has a beginning must have an end. Those are the facts. I don’t like them, but I’ve accepted them, and I will not take any heroic measures to prolong my life beyond the inevitable. I’m resolved to live my life out with intact mind.”

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.”

And I’m realizing that it’s not the child’s responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It’s the parent’s responsibility to learn who the child is, and I didn’t do that, and I’m sorry.”

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

While they could imprison me physically, they could not imprison my mind or my heart or my spirit. And so it was within those realms of myself that I determined that I would live. Within that death cell, in that small space around myself, I had my own sanctuary. I learned to almost totally ignore what was around me.

We’ve always had this bond, this silent love between us.

Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the willingness—the guts, if you like—to face the fear.

And I realized then that we all have a breaking point. And we can never know until we’re faced with the situation what that breaking point actually is.

They gave their today, so that we might have our tomorrow.

I stopped asking for time, and thought about time well spent.