Our blogging team was saddened to learn of the death of Melissa Inouye, a beloved contributor to the Exponent community whose work has been featured in Exponent magazine and blog. Here, some of our bloggers have shared some of their favorite memories of our friend, Melissa.
Nancy Ross: When I first met Melissa Inouye, she was a guest at our wedding, Russ’ friend from college. I then read her writing on blogs and then her scholarship. I read her stories of being a missionary and her family combining traditional cultural practices with Mormonism in her book Crossings.
During Ordain Women’s first year, Melissa tried to open a back channel to church leadership where we could have more direct conversation with them. We spent a number of hours on the phone talking through issues during that year and hoping that the church would be willing have more open conversation. When that didn’t work out, she lamented that loss with me.
Despite cancer treatment, she seemed joyful and youthful at MHA in Park City a few years ago, but much more tired at last year’s conference. She was kind and thoughtful and funny and courageous and intelligent and, as others have noted, respected by just about everyone in Mormon Studies (a very difficult thing to achieve).
My favorite piece of her writing was a blog post where she remembered receiving a difficult phone call about the return of her mother’s cancer while being in the middle of potty training one of her children.
My favorite story about Melissa is the one where she intervened at Gina Colvin’s disciplinary council with a 200 slide powerpoint and persuaded/bullied the church leader into letting Gina keep her church membership.
She was the very best of people.
April Young-Bennett: One of my most memorable experiences with Melissa was when she organized what she called an “intra-faith dialogue.” She invited several conservative and liberal Latter-day Saint academics, bloggers, activists, and LDS Church employees to spend the day together. Her invitation said:
Currently our community is divided. Given our diversity as a global body of Saints, strong differences of opinion are to be expected, but the key issue is that these differences are expressed in an atmosphere of contention. What can we do to love our neighbors, “even” our fellow Latter-day Saints? We don’t expect that we will solve all of our problems in one day, but we can start to come to terms with this challenge in a realistic and candid way.
Melissa Inouye, personal correspondence, April 8, 2015
I was excited to attend until just before the event, when Melissa shared the final guest list. I recognized the names of several vocal critics of the Ordain Women movement. I was terrified about the prospect of being outnumbered in a room full of people who had publicly ridiculed my cause—and sometimes me personally.
I’m not sure what I was afraid they would do, but my fears were unfounded. Melissa skillfully guided a day of friendly listening and sharing, and I came to know people who so vehemently disagreed with me as whole humans, whose lives encompassed so much more than any of the words they had ever posted on the internet. (I later taught Melissa’s framework for respectful dialogue to my own local Relief Society class. It worked so well I had to proselyte it!)
Melissa believed in people. She saw people as the solution, not as barriers or problems to overcome. I’m lucky because I have a recording of one of our conversations together; she appeared once on the Religious Feminism podcast I hosted. Here is something she said that day:
When people are with each other, they’re messy. People are so flawed. People are so imperfect. But I do feel like the solution to the problems that we have now is not in a perfect platform or a well-crafted manifesto or a creed or a certain kind of litmus test, but it’s just in people. And I think as we learn how to embrace each other as children of God, then we’ll be better able to deal with these problems and to cooperate and to forgive.
Melissa Inouye, Religious Feminism Podcast, June 29, 2019
Spunky: Melissa was newly diagnosed with cancer when we moved to Auckland, only a few suburbs away from her. Between moving, finding a place to live, work, new schools for the kids, and everything she had going on with her new diagnosis, medical treatments, and keeping all her promises to everyone, I did not see her as often as I would have liked.
Shortly after we arrived, my daughter was almost 8, so our bishop approached us, expecting that we would encourage our daughter to be baptised. As we sat in the bishop’s office with her for her baptismal interview, she asked the bishop why girls could not have the priesthood. The bishop laughed. I became angry at his laughter. We left with no baptismal date on the calendar.
As I spit out my unhappiness to Melissa as she sat in her kitchen, she lowered her eyes and listened. Just listened. My daughter, in between playing with her sibling and Melissa’s children, knew what we were talking about and eventually joined us. “Did you want to get baptised?” asked Melissa. My daughter said she did. “Then you get to make your choice,” Melissa said. “Its between you and Jesus. That’s all.”
Within a week, we had a baptismal date and Melissa had an invitation to speak at the baptism. It was a very small crowd: just our family of four, Melissa, the bishop, and a missionary couple. The sister missionary giving the baptism talk asked my daughter, “Do you know why you are wearing a white dress today?”
“Because Jesus wore a white dress when He was baptised?” my daughter queried back with an openness that only children have. Melissa, my husband, and I burst into silent giggles, pressing down sound to maintain a degree of reverence.
Soon it was Melissa’s turn to speak. Melissa’s smile is something that everyone knows of her. So is her vibrant energy. I still choose to see and think of her like this, passionately engaging my daughter in the joyful talk about the Holy Ghost and Jesus Christ. Her entire being was filled with the brightness and purity of a child, her focus not on the group, but only on my daughter. Her body, spirit, and every word she spoke sparkled with joyous, contagious, confetti that I still refuse to dust off. This Christlike glimmering saturates all of Melissa’s writing, interactions, and her life.
We were lucky to have Melissa share in our daughter’s baptism. Baptism is a precious, eternal ordinance, signifying a new life. The occasion makes a permanent memory that is sweeter when shared with friends. Perhaps death is also an ordinance; a type of rebirth into a knowingness that we can only long to know in the mortal stage of life. For now, my heart is grateful for this memory, for this love and testimony of Christ that Melissa shared.
God speed, Melissa. I know that you are lighting up the heavens in ways that no human understanding can comprehend or describe.
Books by Melissa Inouye
“Melissa’s smile is something that everyone knows of her. So is her vibrant energy.” I literally attended an event once where she was also there, and that’s exactly how I would describe her, too.
I also really loved the story of her helping your daughter choose to be baptized, even after the bishop had laughed at her for asking why girls don’t have the priesthood, Spunky. She seemed to be a bit wiser than the rest of us. ❤️
Thanks for sharing, Abby!
I found Melissa’s writings while preparing RS lessons many years ago when I was desperate to find beauty in the church. I particularly remember reading her analogy that Mormons are like manure: in a pile they stink but spread around they enrich the soil and help beautiful things grow. 🩷 Her courage and wit and intelligence makes the world, especially the Mormon world, a more beautiful place.