‘Using Act 2 Well’
On July 20, the Rev. Canon Scott Gunn, then-president of the Standing Committee and executive director of Forward Movement, had a cardiac arrest at Singapore Changi Airport while on his way to a vacation in Vietnam. When he collapsed, he sustained a traumatic brain injury, “as a bonus,” he says. While Gunn’s immediate prognosis was not good, the speed and fullness of his recovery surprised his doctors. After 12 days in the hospital, he spent an additional 39 days in Singapore, participating in various kinds of rehabilitative therapies and waiting for the swelling of his brain to subside. When, on September 8, he shared the news that he had been cleared to travel home, it set off a celebration on Episcopal Twitter, where Gunn is a popular figure. Jim Naughton of Connections Magazine spoke with Gunn in early November about his experience. The transcript of their conversation has been edited for clarity.
You had a significant brain injury, and that can complicate memory and perception. When did you first begin to understand what was happening to you?
What I’ve now learned is that it’s very common for people who have injuries like mine to lose chunks of their memory. So for the most part, the first thing I remember is getting discharged from the hospital on August 1, in Singapore. And I do remember Sherilyn [Gunn’s spouse, the Rev. Sherilyn Pearce] explaining to me—she probably explained it to me five times before my remembering it—why I was in the hospital, that my heart had stopped, that I had hurt my head, and it took me a while to just grasp the magnitude of that.
And then Sherilyn told me something else, and at first I thought I misheard her, that I wasn’t hearing it right. So she showed me in writing that when I had the cardiac arrest, they did CPR on me for 59 minutes, and it took six shocks to get my heart going again. And that’s a miracle.
And so part of what I was trying to figure out all at once is, what does this mean for my health, and also, how in the world did I live through this? So it has been a combination of the facts of the situation—You know, what happened? What’s the prognosis? What does the recovery journey look like? Just the facts, ma’am, to paraphrase Dragnet. And then also there’s the meaning of it. Why did this happen—if there’s a known reason?
And I cannot tell you how many medical people I’ve now spoken with who have all used the word miracle, and that introduces a whole other layer of meaning.
I am assuming that being who you are, you have drawn pretty heavily on your faith and your theological understandings as you tried to make meaning of this.
You’re right. The meaning I make of this comes largely out of my theological and spiritual beliefs. Although, it’s interesting, I have had some conversations with unchurched, nonreligious friends, and even if they’re unlikely to involve God in the equation, I think there’s a sense of, ‘Okay, Scott, you dodged a bullet. You didn’t die. So use your Act Two well.’
For me, I think there are a million questions, but one of the ones that comes to mind is ‘Why me?’ And if it’s true that this is a miracle—a real, honest-togosh miracle—what does this mean?
I think it must mean that God has some work or some calling in mind for me. And I was already
serving in the church, so it wasn’t like I was goofing off, you know, about God’s presence in my life. But I do think it has given me some urgency to reflect on all sorts of things with greater urgency and clarity.
Was there a point when you just said, ‘Oh, I’m going to survive?’ when you knew the immediate threat was passed?
Probably the first time I went to a follow-up appointment after I was discharged from the hospital, I went to visit a cardiologist who took care of me in Singapore, and he told me I have a defibrillator implanted now. And he told me that I didn’t need to worry about what happened, that if that ever happened again, my defibrillator would fix it 100% guaranteed, rock solid, I didn’t need to worry about that, and that I’d be good to go, that I had a couple issues to sort out. But he was very reassuring about my long-term prospects.
Sometimes after a brain injury people have a hard time trusting their perceptions. Did you experience that? How are you working through it?
In the Department of Things I’ve Learned this Year, I only knew the vaguest things about brain injuries, and now I know more. And you are exactly right. I couldn’t always trust my own perception and analysis of things, and most of the time I was aware enough to know that. So I would come up with an idea, and I would say to Sherilyn, my loving spouse who flew over right away and was with me in Singapore during my recovery and healing, ‘I have such and such an idea. Is this crazy, or does this sound rational?
And sometimes she said, ‘I think that’s not quite rational.’ And sometimes she said, ‘No, no, that’s rational.’ So I had her there to be to help me, to be a compass. But that was very difficult and it was a huge relief to visit the neurosurgeon last week and have her say, I’m good to go, I don’t need to come back. It’s pretty likely I won’t have any more symptoms from my brain injury. And she didn’t say it was a miracle, but she just said I’m very fortunate because people with the kind of injuries I had—usually it takes longer to recover, but it seems like I’ve healed up really well.
It sounds as though you and Sherilyn had a real experience of community at St. Hilda’s Church in Singapore during your recovery.
Yes. It’s an amazing church. I just think that as a church and as individuals there, they spend more time praying than I think a lot of us do in the Episcopal Church. As I reflect on my time at St. Hilda’s I’m struck by the way they pray for very specific things.
Not just “we pray for our bishops,” but “we pray for our bishop who has an important meeting this afternoon” or whatever it is. And I think there’s something really powerful about that.
Has your sense of urgency changed as your recovery has progressed?
I think early on, back in August and early September, I was still trying to understand my physical condition and trying to figure out if I needed to wrap up my affairs because I had days or weeks. On the plus side, I realized I wasn’t afraid of death. Death didn’t scare me, but I of course don’t want to die. I thought, okay, if the worst-case scenario here is I end up dead, I’m not afraid of that. I have faith. Okay.
As my healing has continued, and as I’ve spoken with more doctors and gotten good reports, every indication says this is something I’ll be telling stories about 25 years from now, which has changed my perspective because it’s not so much, “What am I going to do in the next hour?” but “How do I need to shape and direct my life?”
I think there’s still some urgency because I don’t want to squander the gift I’ve been given, but more a sense that I’m navigating a ship and not a kayak, as it were.
You have preached and written about your experience. What has felt urgent to communicate?
I think what’s felt urgent is to communicate that God’s love for us—generally for creation, but also individually and specifically for you and for me—is vast, is bigger than we can comprehend, that God loves you deeply and God loves me deeply. I hope my life reflects gratitude for that love. It’s so very simple.
But so often, I think in church, we talk all around the essential stuff, but we don’t get to the most important things. Are there things about it that are impossible to communicate, that you just sort of despair to put across the people?
I don’t know that it’s impossible to communicate, but really, I have this desire to convey the sense that every single day and every single moment in that day is a gift from God. I don’t think I palpably understood that the way that I do now.
When I was a parish priest, one of the things that I—enjoyed isn’t quite the right word—but I found it very powerful to spend time with people who were confronting death. Either their own impending death if they were ill, or grieving a loved one who had just died. Because around the time of death, all the distraction of life goes away. And as I’ve said before, I never once met somebody near the end of their life who said, ‘Gosh, I wish I had worked harder on my job.’ Or, ‘I wish I had prioritized getting a new car every three years instead of every four.’ The regrets were always, ‘I wish I’d spent more time with friends, with family.’
And I think almost dying is like confronting death in that way. And it just kind of reorders things. It makes me realize there are all kinds of things I don’t need to worry about. It doesn’t mean I won’t worry about small things sometimes. But it’s helping my perspective.
I always like to end interviews by asking people if there’s something they wanted to tell me that I didn’t give them the opportunity to say.
I would hope that people who know someone who’s going through a life triumph or trauma might have a conversation like this one at the right time. I can have this conversation now because it’s more than three months after the event, and I’ve had some time to process what’s happened. I couldn’t have had it in early August. And I think if anyone reading this knows someone who has faced a trauma in their life or some kind of great triumph in their life, they probably have some compelling meaning that they’ve made of it. Ask them about it.
Read this story in the Winter 2022 edition of Connections Magazine.
