Five days before her death on April 23 at age 44, historian and author Melissa Inouye was interviewed by The Salt Lake Tribune. She spoke about the responsibilities of the people who would be left behind.
She indicated that it’s not enough to cry our tears and mourn an individual who was taken much too soon. On top of that grief, we have a debt to pay: It’s our job to further their work. In fact, she was quite specific about it:
”If someone dies at the ages of 60 and up, it’s OK to just go to their funeral and say what great people they are. If someone dies between the ages of 35 and 60, however, it’s not enough to just memorialize them. It’s everyone’s job to perpetuate those people’s work since they didn’t have time to finish it.”
I’ve been thinking about that charge ever since. Melissa was my friend and colleague, and I was lucky enough to get to hang out with her online once a month in our virtual writing group. She was a lot of things: a tireless advocate for justice in and out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a fierce mom of four kids, an environmental activist in the suburbs, a supporter of refugees and on and on.
She was a bada- - , but the kindest one imaginable.
Even at her funeral Monday, I was learning things about her that I didn’t know, like the time she had ticked off the president of her neighborhood’s homeowners association in her quest to rid their community pond of something called phragmites. (In case you, like me, have no idea what a phragmite is — picturing perhaps a hybrid of a stalagmite and a colorful character from “Fraggle Rock” — let me put you out of your misery: They’re invasive and non-native reeds that rob other plants of nutrients. Now we know.)
Melissa was so involved in so many things that the world will be a better place if everyone who knew her chooses just one of those things to work on.
What will that be for you?
Maybe you could take her example of going global. Melissa was one of the most cosmopolitan people I’ve ever known, someone who had lived all over the world and was endlessly interested in other cultures. So curious.
In two weeks, a sad-but-joyful group of scholars will be meeting in Mexico City for the Global Mormon Studies conference. We haven’t met in person since 2022, in England, so it’s exciting. We’ll get to learn a great deal about the history of Mormonism in Mexico. We’ll also be devastated because Melissa, the founder of the feast, won’t be there to join us. It was because of Melissa’s push to move Mormon studies beyond its Euro-American focus that the Global Mormon Studies conference was created in the first place.
(Deseret Book and Melissa Inouye) Latter-day Saint scholar and writer Melissa Inouye died Tuesday at the age of 44. Her legacy includes both groundbreaking scholarship regarding global Christianity, and deeply personal writings about her wrestle with life's challenges.
Now we’ll be meeting without her, and there will be tears and regrets. Yet the work goes on. Melissa would want the work to go on.
Maybe for you the work will be in making The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints function more like the local ward, or congregation, which Melissa thought was a genius means of enabling community, and less like a hierarchical corporation, a corporation Melissa worked for and wanted to help repair.
In that final interview with The Tribune, she was dreaming of ways the institutional church could grow and change, to make it a more egalitarian, effective place. Right now, she said, 24 of the church’s 25 departments are headed by men. Only one, the human resources department, is led by a woman.
All of us could sit around and speak in astonished outrage about the fact that such inequality is occurring in 2024, or we could work on improving the situation. Rather, we should express our outrage at the inequality and work to improve it. Melissa was all about the frank and open naming of problems.
So perhaps you will carry on Melissa’s work by openly naming inequality when and where you see it, even if — especially if — well-meaning people try to defend injustice by trying to convince you that’s what Jesus would want.
Or perhaps your task will be to further Melissa’s work of seeking out the misfits and the marginalized wherever you find them. At her funeral, her father spoke of a family creed that was something like “Find the green beans” — the idea being that wherever you go, there will be people who are hurting who need your help.
I don’t know why their family called those people “green beans,” but I like to imagine that maybe it was because little kids tend not to like green beans and will avoid them in favor of every other thing on the plate. And how would that ostracization make the green beans feel?
Melissa, he said, had a lifelong passion for finding the green beans and helping them understand their worth. Maybe that is something you can do, too.
My own task, as I stumble forward in a Melissa-less world, is all of the above to the extent I am able: Thinking globally, calling out injustice and ministering on the Island of Misfit Toys.
But Melissa also left me another task, one I can’t think about without crying. Shortly before she died, she shared a Google Doc of her unfinished cancer memoir with me and one of her oldest friends from college, with the message:
“This is a backup in case
I run out of time.”
No instructions, no explanations. Just trust that her two friends would complete her work somehow and find a publisher who would bring it to light. She knew at that point that she was running out of time, and she was counting on us.
In fact, she sent us that message April 18, the same day she gave the interview to The Tribune, saying, “It’s not enough just to memorialize” people who die young; “it’s everyone’s job to perpetuate those people’s work since they didn’t have time to finish it.”
Finish it we will.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jana Riess has a new book and research about Mormon millennials.
