I ran across a meme on Facebook last week that asked the question "Which is more important, the journey or the destination?".

In the past I have written articles like : Healing is a Journey, Not a Destination, where I had tried to touch base on what we have learned in the almost 14 years since we lost our son John to suicide.  Most folks have heard me talk about the journey of healing that takes place for suicide loss survivors.  It is a deeply introspective walk where we often question many of the "givens" we had in our life before the loss.   Our lives are fundamentally changed by the loss and it truly is up to us to decide where this journey will take us.

I always thought that the answer to the question was the journey, because there is no destination called healed.  Healed is a mythical place.  There is a place called healing, it is a continuous place along the journey and most suicide loss survivors don't even realize it when they arrive  there.  We tend to beat ourselves up because we are still having difficult thoughts and feelings long after the loss.  Our own emotions often prevent us from understanding that we have made it through what was likely the most painful moment of our lives.  Survivors rarely give themselves the credit for how far they have come, and they focus on how far they think they need to go.

I stopped and thought about it and realized that the company that we keep on the journey is probably even more important than the journey by itself.  The company are the folks around us that understand and help us through the difficult moments we have faced after the suicide of a loved one.  They are the people that lift us up off the ground and help us find our feet to stand on.  I touched on this when I wrote Day 2,922 of our Journey: The Gift , where I realized that there were all sorts of people that had empathy and compassion to help us along our journey.  Borrowing from something a friend said when I first wrote the blog, there are people who are firefighters for our souls.  They rush into the proverbial burning building or car wreck and help carry us out.  They offer the treatments we need to get through the unimaginable.  They give us the oxygen we need to breathe.   They may just stand by silently as we unload the latest issue we are facing.  They have the ability to stand next to us and understand that they can't fix us, they just need to be with us.  They help us find ourselves among the wreckage.