The Healing Journey

November 9, 2024

“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”
― Frederick Buechner

In his memoir, “The Sacred Journey,” author and minister Frederick Buechner wrote about a day he remembered all his life, a day that was filled with the promise of excitement. It was a Saturday in late fall. He was 10 and his brother was 8. Their parents were going to take them to a football game. The boys woke before the others and played in their bedroom. “What happened next was that our bedroom door opened a little, and somebody looked in on us,” he wrote. “It was our father. Later on, we could not remember anything more than that….However, that moment was the last of my childhood because when I opened the door again, measurable time was, among other things, what I opened it on.”

The house suddenly erupted in crisis. Their grandmother muttered, “Something terrible has happened!” The boys looked out the window and saw a blue haze of smoke, and their father lying on his back in the driveway. The doctor arrived, followed by neighbors. Several days later they found a note to their mother that said, “I adore and love you and am no good….Give Freddy my watch. Give Jamie my pearl pin. I give you all my love.”

Carl Frederick Buechner Sr. committed suicide because he was convinced he was a failure.

“When somebody you love dies, Mark Twain said, it is like when your house burns down; it isn’t for years that you realize the full extent of your loss,” Buechner wrote. “For me, it was longer than for most, if indeed I have realized it fully even yet, and meanwhile the loss came to get buried so deep in me that after a time I scarcely ever took it out to look at it at all, let alone to speak of it. If ever anybody asked me how my father died, I would say heart trouble. That seemed at least a version of the truth.”

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