Presentations discuss preserving and sharing personal history

SALT LAKE CITY — She is an accomplished author and poet; he is an emeritus general authority of the LDS Church. The commonality they have is a love and joy of preserving and sharing personal history.

That was reflected Saturday evening as Emma Lou Thayne and F. Enzio Busche spoke on the theme "The Story of My Life," in separate presentations, at the LDS Church History Museum, as part of the "Evenings at the Museum" series.

Thayne, a university teacher of writing and a former member of the Deseret News board of directors, said she has taken to closing her journal entries with the signature, "Lucky Lady," an appellation given to her by her father.

"We grew up liking each other as well as loving each other," she said of her family life.

A saying of her mother, "You're no better than anyone, but you're just as good," meant that the children "loved everybody," Thayne said. "We got to be friends with people that weren't a bit like us."

In the process, she said she learned the power of a good story.

"The whole thing was a celebration of life," she said," a celebration of doing what we do, and writing came as just part of that."

Thayne said she has been pushing for a long time to have people in her family write their stories, including her husband, her brothers and their wives.

"I'm just encouraging you to get your stories down, because it means so much," she said.

Elder Busche reflected on his boyhood in Germany, where he was a teenager during World War II. He spoke of searching for splinters, as souvenirs of the first bomb that was dropped on his hometown, not knowing that sometime later, he would be fleeing in fear of such bombs.

On one occasion, he said, he asked his father if there is a God. He was shocked when his father replied, "I don't know; I wish I could tell you." That, he said, put him into a depression.

After the war, when Busche was newly married, LDS missionaries knocked on his door. He was prepared, he said, to receive them because of a spiritual experience he had earlier — in a hospital where he was recovering from a liver disease. On that occasion, he heard a voice speaking from the ceiling, "If you can pray now, you will recover," he recalled.

Busche said that at the time, he did not know how to pray. But the words came to his mind in German: "Thy will be done."

From that time forward, he said, he was completely healed, not only from his disease, which had been assumed to be fatal, but in other ways as well.

"I have never forgotten that," he said. "It was so powerful and so real, that I have learned to understand there is a different dimension in life, that we have the opportunity to open up in our own life's understanding and to find more joy."

e-mail: rscott@desnews.com