Perspective: Scholar, author, wife and mother Melissa Inouye dies at age 44

On Monday evening, I saw that Melissa Inouye had entered hospice care, and on Tuesday morning, I saw that she had died of colon cancer, at age 44. She leaves behind a husband and four children — and a world blessed with her love, her light, her wit and her grace.

I can’t exactly remember the first time I was introduced to Dr. Inouye’s work (she has a Ph.D. from Harvard), but I know I’ve been a fan from Day 1. She wrote and spoke on things that matter to me: peace building, racism, women’s roles (especially within a religious context) and democracy.

Inouye was also a historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She helped create the Global Mormon Studies research network and was an advisory board member of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship . With Kate Holbrook, she wrote the book “Every Needful Thing: Essays on the Life of the Mind and the Heart.” Her co-author, also a historian for the church, died from cancer in August 2022. I imagine they had quite the joyful reunion.

Inouye wrote and spoke in many places around the world. I listened to her speak at the “Proclaim Peace” conference held on the campus of BYU-Hawaii in June 2022, where she shared what happened at a school board meeting in Utah. Both she and a woman found themselves on opposite sides of a highly charged issue. Both felt a charge to “root out racism,” as President Russell M. Nelson charged people to do. Both wanted to make sure children felt like they belonged. And, she said, they both went about it in completely opposite directions. She asked, “How do we keep our covenants when ‘the enemy’ is a fellow covenant-maker?”

“Difference is not a symptom of brokenness or disease,” she said. “It is the eternal fact of difference and God’s ability to encompass and embrace difference ... it is a comfort in the midst of conflict when we find intractable difference in the world and society, in the church, in Sunday School, or our family, we need not panic that something is broken and God needs to fix it. Instead, we should feel this point of difference as a foothold and diverse humanity as a way to ... connect the world’s many differences.”

Her last book, released last year, is “Sacred Struggle: Seeking Christ on the Path of Most Resistance,” “a great-souled work by a great-souled woman,” said fellow author and scholar Terryl Givens. It’s a “treatise on trials,” said “Faith Matters” in its conversation with her last December. Inouye asserts that the struggle and the difficulties we face in this life are not possible to avoid. In fact, they are the reason we are here. How, then, do we make meaning of the struggle and use it to connect with others?

In an essay for Wayfare Magazine , published last November, she writes that sometimes, things are not just hard — they are too hard. What then? “Since the beginning of the human experience, humans have been trying to make sense of pain. But sometimes there is no sense. Sometimes, rich as they are, cultural practices, religious rites, and thoughtful theologies simply fall short of the realities of lived experience,” she writes.

And again, for Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship , she writes: “Having experienced suffering, one develops power over it — not the power to stop it, or take it away from someone you love, but to know its sorrows fade. Having experienced suffering, one receives power from it — the power to share others’ burdens and be humble, to see one’s own burdens and be kind.

“On the other side of suffering is strength.”

As one who has felt suffering and who has also tried to learn compassion and empathy from my walks into the shadows, her words speak to me and sink deep into my soul.

When she was announced as the plenary speaker at the Mormon Women for Ethical Government annual conference last month, I knew I needed to hear her. Her voice raspy and with a cough she said came from “cancery things,” she spoke on, of all things, hope. She did not shy away from the difficulties of the past or the present, but she also drew on the strength of women and their voices, both past and present, to promote peace. She asked us to think kindly of our “political enemies,” to notice how intelligent and caring they are. She asked us to get involved, to be present with others, acknowledge that there are multiple perspectives and to remember that we were born for such a time as this.

As I sat at the back of the room, I was directly behind her family. I watched her husband and her children watch their wife and mother present to a packed room. I watched them as she made us laugh, cry and cheer, and as she got a standing ovation. Maybe they knew she was close to the end. I wonder if she knew this might be her last public speech. She must have had some inkling, because she asked us to link arms and work to bring about peace.

“What I cannot carry forward, my sisters will carry for me,” she said.

Yes. We will, dear sister Melissa. Yes, we will.