The recent passing of the premier LDS woman of letters Carol Lynn Pearson (whom I trust needs no introduction here) sent me back to her very first book, the aptly named poetry collection Beginning, where I was delighted to realize that, like a true Latter-day Saint, she had been looking forward to her final end from the very start of her career. The following poem is happily representative of the collection entire:

That was written and published 50 years ago—perhaps with the arrogance of relative youth, when it is still easy to take a blasé approach towards death before the grey hairs and wrinkles really do come in—but I sincerely hope that as she approached the end, that she felt those words just as keenly and warmly as she did in 1975, such that when the ugly mask came off, she too leapt with open arms into eternity. This too has been a new beginning. Maybe that’s what Eternity is, an endless series of bold new beginnings.

There’s been an odd synchronicity to the timing of her passing, coming as it does just a week before some BYU PhDs published a study confirming that, for the first time ever, more young women are leaving the Church than young men—and I find myself yearning to hear what the woman who once wrote “Could Feminism Have Saved the Nephites” might have commented on this new phenomenon.

But then I reflect that she probably would have pointed out that there was nothing new about this phenomenon at all, but merely the latest expression of what the Savior said from the beginning—that when he said “Do unto others as ye would have them do unto you,” the obvious corollary was always “Others will do unto you what you have done unto them”—so hence to have treated our young women as marginal and “auxiliary” to the Church for so long, only made it easier to treat the Church as merely auxiliary to our own lives. Call this a tragedy, call it a loss of Spiritual blessings perhaps, but do not call it surprising: What is strange isn’t that it’s finally happening, but that it took so long to finally happen at all.

But as ever, the Savior was wiser; as was Carol Lynn Pearson. As it was in the end, so shall it be in the beginning.