Tallu Schuyler Quinn - What We Wish Were True : Reflections on Nurturing Life and Facing Death

These days have been physically taxing, mentally confusing, and logistically full. I cant seem to get through telling even the shortest story without losing focus. I am exhausted, and my train of thought derails quickly. Comprehension of numbers, names, time, and memory are slipping at what feels like a fast clipespecially recent memories. I can communicate numbers by offering a math problem but not by saying the number itself. Anything in an orderletters, days, monthshas become so disordered in my mixed-up mind. Does June come after May? My confusion is deepening. I get upside down about relationships, even my closest ones, momentarily needing to clarify that my mom is my mom and my spouse is my spouse.

But I continue to experience gratitude along this journey. It is tucked among my sorrow, my exhaustion, and my confusion. But in such a sad time, gladness takes extra effort. I hold my children close and sob when I consider what my early death will eclipse of knowing them and mothering them, and what watching me die at their young ages will mean for them. How will they experience this, tell this, live this, recover from this?

Lately I am constantly thinking about how limited our human sight is, and how now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known (I Corinthians 13:12). What will crossing into death feel like? What does it have to offer, as I step nearer, as it pulls me in? Dying is not an experience anyone else can do for me. While others can journey closely and with profound devotion and love, no one else will be able to die for me. Im entering that alone, even as others offer their love and presence and deep prayers for healing and peace. How unexpected that, finding myself at this threshold, I experience fullness in death and in many ways so much loss in living life.

Im seeing we have to live with the threat or knowledge that death is imminent in order to get more honest, and I feel so much judgment in situations when I hear people complaining about their work or ranting about their spouses. And conversely, it is very difficult for me to hear my friends talk about their twentieth wedding anniversary or their childrens graduation, even as I want these things for them. My mind tries to give shape to what those events and milestones will look like for my own family, our children, without me alive to be part of witnessing it all.

I am understanding that facing my own death requires an active release and deep letting go of nearly all I hold dearest. It is so, so hard, but at this threshold, I both marvel in awe and wail in despair about all the love my life contains and how those experiences of expressed love continue to be so meaningful to me. But its in this way that profoundly, blessedly, unexpectedly, my broken heart is saving me. Decisions are clarified, relationships are repaired, attention is focused, and we are sharing more truthfully. It is not perfect, but it is courageous.

My life has been and continues to be full of extraordinary gifts: the curved pinky fingers that look just like my dads, the milk from my mothers chest, the profound love I feel for my two brothers, the food that sustains us, the friendships that buoy us, the trees that purify our air so we can breathe it, the animals who are slain for our nourishment, my children whose voices delight, and the body of my beloved. I am dying young of a tenacious, insidious, incurable brain cancer. But God is everywhere, for alone is a myth.

Tallu Quinn

Nashville, Tennessee

October 2021