A Crazy, Holy Grace by Frederick Buechner

Author:Frederick Buechner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

My mother, the elder of Naya’s two daughters, refused to talk about death the way she refused to talk about a great many other things. I remember telling her once that unless she started balancing her checkbook, she would go on overdrawing her account with disastrous results for the rest of eternity, and before I had much more than begun my lecture, she clapped her hands over her ears so she couldn’t hear a syllable. She refused even to talk about people she loved who had died—Naya, for instance. It made her too sad, she said. Her New York apartment was full of photographs in silver frames, leather frames, Victorian rhinestone and millefiori frames, but they were photographs only of the living. Once in Vermont when I showed her a picture that I had dug up somewhere of her father as a young man, she hardly so much as glanced at it.

But there was one day, I remember, when in the midst of some conversation we were having about nothing in particular she suddenly turned to me and said out of the blue, “Do you really believe anything happens after you die?” and all at once she was present to me in a way she rarely was. She was no longer on stage. She was no longer in character. She had stepped off into the wings for a moment, and the words she had spoken were not in the script. Her face was for the moment not the one she had skillfully assembled in front of her dressing-table mirror that morning with lipstick, powder, and eyebrow pencil, but her own true face.

She had come a long way from the little girl in frilly white with the upside-down flowers in her lap. She was in her eighties with bad arthritis in her knees and was wearing whichever one of her many hearing aids she happened to have chosen that day, although none of them ever seemed to do her much good. I always suspected that it was not so much because she was deaf that she couldn’t hear, but because there was so much she didn’t want to hear that she chose to be deaf. To get anything through to her you had to say it at the top of your lungs, so in answer to her question, I said YES. I said I believed SOMETHING HAPPENS. But there are things that cannot be shouted, and as soon as I tried in my more or less normal voice to tell her a little more about what I believed and why I believed it, I could see that she was not only not hearing, but also not listening. Just to have asked the question seemed for the time being to be as much as she could handle.

So later, when I got home, I tried to answer the question in a letter. I wrote her I believe that what happens when you die is that, in ways I knew no more about than she did, you are given back your life again, and I said there were three reasons why I believed it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.