The Healing Journey

September 13, 2024

The news came over the police scanner, and everyone in the newsroom stopped what they were doing and imagined the worst. Someone had jumped in front of an Amtrak train at the station, so John sent a reporter out to cover it. In a matter of minutes, she called back and said, “I think it’s Charlie.” Everyone’s heart sank. “How could it happen?” they wondered. And yet in the back of their minds, they knew how it could happen because they had tried for months to prevent it from happening.

Some cried, others were in such shock they couldn’t finish their work, and still others held out a fading hope that it might not be him so they waited for the police to provide a positive identification. As the minutes turned to hours, the reporter became more traumatized as she surveyed what happened. She had worked with Charlie for years. He was one of the best editors on the news desk, albeit a bit eccentric. He was single and lived alone. He was middle-aged while the rest of them were in their 20s, just starting out in their careers on a community newspaper.

Charlie had no family that they knew of and had become sort of a father figure to them all. He read the New York Times daily and consumed history book after history book. He was an encyclopedia and could talk about everything from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Battle of Britain. And if he edited your copy, you had better be sure you checked the names and titles because he delighted in catching errors and announcing them publicly.

John thought back on the last two years. Somehow he had believed he could prevent the inevitable. Charlie had been hospitalized with a series of breakdowns. His medication didn’t seem to be working, and everyone saw signs that his mental state was deteriorating.

John required him to get counseling from the company’s EAP program, and for a while, it seemed the situation was turning around. But no one knew for sure what the problem was, other than “mental illness.” None of it made sense to them. The experts should have been able to “solve” the problem. One day their coworker went from being a jocular and pleasant fellow to becoming a tormented and troubled soul they couldn’t help no matter how hard they tried.

Now, it was over, and they were consumed by a combination of regret, guilt, anger, and trauma they would carry with them for a long, long time.

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