1: “To know a person well,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person, we “have to know who they were before they suffered their losses and how they remade their whole outlook after them. . .
“To know someone who has grieved, we have to know how they have processed their loss—did they emerge wiser, kinder, and stronger, or broken, stuck, and scared?”
Knowing how to accompany someone through grief is core to what it means to be a good friend and a good person, David believes.
The year was 1936. Frederick Buechner was ten years old. One morning, he woke up at sunrise.
“He and his brother, who was eight, were excited because their parents were going to take them to a football game,” David writes.
“The game was not what excited them; it was the thought of the whole family, grandmother included, going on an outing, with treats and fun and adventures.
“It was still too early to get up, so the boys lay in bed. At one point, their door opened, and their father looked in on them. Years later, neither brother could remember if their father said anything to them. It seemed like just a casual check any parent might make to ensure that everybody was safe.”
2: Then, they heard a scream.
“They looked out their window and saw their father lying on the gravel driveway,’ David writes, “with their mother and grandmother, barefoot and still in their nightgowns, leaning over him. Each woman had one of his legs in her hands. They were lifting his legs up and down as if they were operating two handles of a pump. Nearby, the garage door was open, and blue smoke was billowing out.”
Later, a doctor arrived, his car wheels screeching in the driveway. He shook his head.
“Their father had gassed himself to death,” David notes. “It took them a few days to find the suicide note, which their dad had scratched in pencil on the last page of Gone with the Wind. It was addressed to their mom: ‘I adore you and love you, and am no good….Give Freddy my watch. Give Jamie my pearl pin. I give you all my love.'”
Frederick’s mother decided to move the family to Bermuda. Their grandmother disagreed with this decision, telling her to “stay and face reality.”
Many years later, Frederick wrote that his mother and grandmother were both right and not right: “Reality can be harsh and that you shut your eyes to it only at your peril because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destroy you while you are facing the other way.”
On the other hand, he and his brother and mother loved Bermuda, and some healing did happen there. “Reality for me was this,” he recalled years later, “out of my father’s death there came, for me, a new and, in many ways, happier life.”
It was a time of “sealing up,” David writes. “One day, about a year after the suicide, Frederick saw his brother crying and asked him what was wrong. When he realized he was crying for their father, he was astonished. He had gotten over that pain long ago—so he thought.
“His mother had closed down, too. Frederick didn’t see her cry after the suicide, and they rarely spoke of his father afterward. She could be a warm person and sometimes generous, but she kept her heart closed to other people’s suffering as well as her own. ‘The sadness of other people’s lives, Buechner recalled, “even the people she loved, never seemed to touch her where she lived.'”
Still, he wrote, “I cannot say the grief faded because, in a sense, I had not yet, unlike my brother, really felt that grief. That was not to happen for thirty years or more. But the grief was postponed.”
3: As a young adult, Frederick visited his mother at her apartment in New York City.
“They were about to sit down to dinner when the phone rang,” David writes. “A friend of his was weeping. He had just learned that his parents and pregnant sister had been in a car crash, and it was unclear if any of them would survive. Would Frederick be willing to come to the airport to sit with him until his plane departed?”
He shared what had happened with his mother and that he had to leave immediately.
“She found the whole situation absurd,” David writes. “Why was a grown man asking somebody to come sit with him? What good could it possibly do? Why ruin an evening they had both been looking forward to?”
He realized his mother was verbalizing the thoughts in his head. Yet, when he heard her saying them, he was revulsed. “How could anybody be so unfeeling, so cut off from the suffering of a friend?” he thought.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. The friend shared that another friend had agreed to come to the airport, so Frederick was no longer needed.
3: “But that episode shocked Frederick and launched a journey,” David writes. “It was as if time, which had stopped the day his father killed himself, restarted.”
He began a decades-long quest into the core realities of what it means to be human: “What I was suddenly most drawn to now was the dimension of what lay beneath the surface and behind the face. What was going on inside myself, behind my own face. . .”
Frederick realized that most of us are on a journey to find the self we are meant to be. “He saw that this journey inevitably involved facing our pain and using our experiences to help others face their own.”
His exploration also led him to learn more about his father: What had it been like to grow up in a family that produced two suicides and three alcoholics?
When Frederick “met people who had known his dad,” David writes, “he’d ask them questions about what he was like, but their answers failed to satisfy: He was charming, handsome, a good athlete. Nobody could solve the elemental mystery: What demons lurked within him that drove him to that ending?”
Frederick became a novelist “of great compassion, faith, and humanity,” David notes. As he got older, he would weep real tears for his father.
“In his old age, he wrote that not a single day went by without him thinking of his dad,” David shares. “He had come to realize that excavation is not a solitary activity. It’s by sharing our griefs with others, and thinking together about what they mean, that we learn to overcome fear and know each other at the deepest level.
“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets.
“. . . It is important to tell our secrets too,” he wrote, “because it makes it easier…for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”
Ultimately, Frederick’s quest led him to the following realization: “The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Do I have any experience with grief or trauma? What about David’s writing here resonates with me?
Action: Discuss with a family member, friend, or colleague.
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