Harry Scherer
MSMU Class of 2022

"My husband and I just turned 30 in December and our main hope and our main prayer for this next decade of our lives is just that nothing happens. Everything happened in the decade of our 20s and now it’s time to just be normal."

Megan Quaranta, née Kinsella, Class of ‘13 laughed as she shared this ironic and admittedly impossible prayer. I learned throughout our conversation that this prayer is not one seeking inactivity but one seeking the grace to deal with the expected hyperactivity.

The story of Meg’s 20s is one that proves what can happen when we say yes. When Meg went out on a run on a cold winter morning of her spring semester sophomore year with her two friends, Kathryn Franke, C’12, MBA’13 and Stephanie Joson, C’13, she didn’t expect to run into Mike Hillman, editor of the community news publication for which she would write for the rest of her time at college. When Mike said that the Emmitsburg News-Journal was looking for student writers, she spontaneously agreed and welcomed the opportunities that would come with the new responsibility.

Meg fondly remembers the time she spent working on the paper while at the Mount: "I really just miss writing. Writing for the ENJ just gave me an excuse to write." She also valued the sense of accomplishment that writing for the paper collectively offered to herself and her fellow writers.

After graduating from the Mount, she said yes to becoming a missionary with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) in Lafayette, LA. Meg remembers the culture shock of "being immersed in a completely new culture" and appreciated all the "awesome people who were so welcoming." During that missionary year, in October of 2013, she said yes to her then-boyfriend Mark when he asked her to marry him. The next year, she became a youth minister at a parish in Falston, MD. A month after Mark and she said their "I do"s in November of 2014, Meg was put in the position of having to say yes to something much more daunting.

At the age of 23, Meg was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After consulting with her doctor, Meg and Mark made the active decision to forgo chemotherapy, principally because of the unknown risks associated with fertility. Instead, Meg underwent weekly infusions of maintenance immunotherapy for the first two months of 2015. During that period in their lives, Meg’s family lived about two hours away and Mark’s about three to four hours. Even with the distance, Meg remembers her parents and sister sitting with her during the infusions that would take about six to seven hours long per session. She fondly recalls the effort on the part of her husbands’ family to produce bracelets that read "MegStrong." Consistent with her general approach to life, Meg confirmed that "other than the grace of God, that’s how we got through it, being totally lifted up in prayer and spiritual and material support."

After she was diagnosed with the cancer, Meg and her husband had to consider both the demands of her conscience and the most efficient means by which her body would heal. After they were clear that Meg would not undergo chemotherapy at the outset of her treatment, the doctors were understanding and willing to work with them. Throughout her treatment and at each of her pregnancies, medical personnel assumed that "you don’t want to have children any time soon" and repeatedly, but unsurprisingly, asked about their plans for birth control. Meg remembers that she was never sick when she was younger and "hardly ever got a cold." She credits her time of sickness as "God’s way of preparing us to continue to make decisions for ourselves… I never had to know how to be your own advocate, so this was our first step in doing that." This is only one of the ways in which Meg sees this time of illness as a gift and a time that offered so much potential to grow early in her and her husband’s marriage.

Meg shared with me that it is "very possible that this could come back some day." A recognition of this reality might paralyze some in fear or debilitate their ability to fulfill their roles at work or in the home. I noticed that Meg acknowledged this potential reoccurrence without any sense of fear or dread. Instead, Meg says that "I just have such a good support system in my husband and in my family and I think that we’ve been blessed with really child-like faith and He’s got us and He’s protecting us and it’s His will." These words might be easy to say without experiencing the demands that come from such an abandonment to divine providence, but Meg’s experience of living and bearing a child while fighting cancer is testament enough to the truth that she has indeed lived and felt the demands of such an abandonment of her own will.

At the same time, she recognizes that she is not currently fighting the cancer. It is evident, though, that Meg is not sentimentalizing the past or experiencing delusions of grandeur. Instead, she acknowledges the deeper truths that got her and her husband through the more frightening times at the beginning of their marriage; "I think we learned early on in our marriage that we could be frozen in fear and not move forward and just say ‘why me?’ and ‘poor me why did this happen to me? This is terrifying.’ Or, we could hike up our bootstraps and figure out how to fight it and still find joy in our everyday."

Throughout my conversation with Meg, it became clear to me that perhaps one of the keys to her success in fighting this more difficult time in her life is the fact that she does not take herself too seriously. She admitted to me that neither she nor her husband frequently discuss this time of sickness in her life. For anyone who talks to her, it is crystal clear that she is not doing any sort of unhealthy psychological suppression; on the contrary, she is about as in-touch with reality and her own experience as a person can be. She said, sounding like she was smiling on the other end of the phone call, "I think because it happened so early in our marriage, we were 23, we were able to see the upside of it." Meg speaks with optimism of the upside to the destruction of her own plans having to be replaced by the plans of God. This optimism confirms the benefits of Meg not taking herself too seriously. Through her period of sickness and afterward, it seems that Meg found and continues to find peace in a view of her life as not her own but rather a beautiful gift granted to her by God with which He continues to invite her to allow Him to do His will.

Today, Meg continues to thrive and be excited by this daily potential to do the will of God with her husband and three children, Rose, 4, John, 3, and James, 1. Throughout the day, Meg finds herself tending to the typical concerns of a mother with three small children: the sufficient exhaustion of energy throughout the day, the maintenance of vital bodily functions and the enjoyment of this time with them. Meg continues to say yes to the unknown joys and challenges of each day.

To college students of today, Meg encourages us to "not waste time. Take advantage of your friends being so close and develop good friendships and really invest in your faith and take advantage of all the opportunities the Mount has. I don’t mean just do all the activities. It’s about living in a place where there’s so much friendship and so much faith." At the same time, she invites students to place more emphasis on actually learning than the grade obtained in a course; "Years from now, you’re going to wish that you actually listened in that class and grew from that information instead of just digesting stuff to blurt it back out on exam."

This simple advice comes from a woman who has learned not just in the classroom but from her own difficult experiences. By the grace of God and by her own talent, it seems fair to guess that the decade of her 30s is going to be far from normal if she keeps saying yes.

Read other articles by Harry Scherer

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