“THE COMPASSIONATE FRIENDS”

THIS GROUP OFFERS SUPPORT FOR BEREAVED PARENTS

By Peggy Balfour, TCF/Canada

God knows I’m not by nature a trailblazer. When He wants me to do something, He usually has to find someone to give me a push. Beginning a group to help bereaved parents was no exception. I was calmly sitting in a restaurant when He pushed me into that.

It was 1979. Early spring sunshine splashed over our table as two friends and I were sharing the vicissitudes of our lives. I was talking about the idea of forming a group for people like me who had experienced the death of a child.

"I’ve put the death of my son behind me,” I said, not knowing how untrue that was, “but two young couples in our parish are going through the same agony right now and they seem to find it helpful to talk about it together. They want me to start a group, but I don’t know…..” I suppose I looked and sounded reluctant and over-burdened. “I don’t really want to,” I admitted. My negative attitude seemed justified when my friends mumbled in sympathetic agreement.

God had a different viewpoint. Just then a woman walked past our booth on her way to the door and dropped a note on our table. This is what it said: “I couldn’t help hearing your conversation. If you do form a group, please call me at this number….My seventeen year old son died last month and I don’t know how to go on living.”

Astonished, we agreed I had to do it. The instigator of that push wasn’t taking any chances with me: there were two witnesses!

Soon the two young mothers and I put an ad in the daily paper. Eight people turned up for our first meeting and they became our core group. For almost a year we met together every month, sharing our own grief, and studying how to support other bereaved parents. We found helpful books such as Harriet Schiff’s The Bereaved Parent, all of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ books on death and dying, and Rabbi Earl Grollman’s beautifully written book on, Living When A Loved One Has Died. We attended a local seminar on death at which Rabbi Grollman himself was one of the enablers.

I had suspected it would hurt to unearth long-buried grief over my own son’s death, and it did. I hadn’t realized, however, that when memories still blister and burn, they are not yet healed. Had you come to my home then, in 1979, I’d have shown off three large photographs: our beautiful daughter, the R.N. our younger son, a CHUM radio operator, and our Katie, a glamorous college student. You’d have seen no sign of our first-born David. By 1980, thanks to the work we did in the core group (my husband was a member of it, too), there was a fourth large photograph: five year old David, smiling happily from his beloved tricycle.

With grief work like this done, our little group became ready to reach out to others. We began to send out cards to parents whose bereavement was announced in the newspaper. Some of them came to our meetings. We began to send out a quarterly newsletter to keep in touch and to share helpful material. Finally, we discovered that other similar groups existed, some under the leadership of The Compassionate Friends, an international organization offering friendship and understanding to bereaved parents.

This organization had its beginning in Coventry, England, in 1969 when two families whose sons died about the same time, found they could help and support each other in a special way. These parents, with their rector, the Rev. Simon Stephens, began the Society of Compassionate Friends. The idea spread to the United States, then to Canada, Australia and Africa. The first Canadian group, formed in Winnipeg by Joan and Bob Martin, had become the National Headquarters for Canada under the able leadership of people like the late Gwen Brown, Edith Fraser and Ken Pinch. There are now chapters of Compassionate Friends all across Canada, including French chapters known as Les Amis Compatissants, and ours, in Sault Ste. Marie.

Grief, like a flesh wound, has to heal from the inside; otherwise it will fester. We don’t know how many of the problems people are experiencing today stem from some unhealed wound of grief, from a sorrow unexpressed. We do know that the divorce rate among bereaved parents is high, and that many turn to alcohol and tranquilizers to ease their pain.

But grief shared is grief halved. Simon Stephens wrote,

“Grief becomes a tolerable and creative experience only when love enables it to be shared with someone who really understands. The death of one’s child is unnatural: No one expects to outlive one’s own child.”

Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth:

As we listen to one another at our meetings, how reassuring it is to find that we aren’t crazy or peculiar, and we aren’t alone. We’ve all had friends who tell us to ‘snap out of it,’ or to get busy with other concerns. They mean well, but they fail to realize that each person owns his or her own grief and no one else's, not even a spouse, can dictate its pathways or its duration. In our group Dennis has needed to share his feelings of guilt for a less than perfect relationship with his son, now that there are no more tomorrows in which to repair it. Susan needed to talk about her bitter feelings against the driver who killed her young daughter. One father asked, “Why did God take my clever boy and leave my handicapped son?” A mother smiled through her tears as she described how her young daughter’s faith in God eased the whole family through her long illness and death.

When a child dies, the whole family structure changes. The second child may now become the oldest, or a child may suddenly become the baby of the family again; a whole host of guilty feelings can attack these siblings. We have to find ways to help our surviving children with their grief, ways to develop new relational structures within the family to repair the breach.

For most of us, at the time, it is an added sorrow that life goes relentlessly on despite our overwhelming loss. When our son died three days before Christmas, it stunned me to see that everyone else was still out Christmas shopping as through nothing had happened. Sometimes our loss isn’t noticed at all when we expect it might be. Susan Borrowman of the Kingston, Ontario, Compassionate Friends has expressed this in her moving poem, Sunlight / Sunset.

The subject of death may be one of society’s last taboos, the death of a child doubly so, but like all other taboos it needs to be confronted. At our meetings I look around and I marvel at the way God has brought us together to share our grief and our stories. I am amazed at the love that flows, at the tears and yes, laughter that attend us as we all minister to one another. Painfully we are learning that there are gifts in suffering. Some of these gifts are for ourselves, making us better, stronger people, some are for others as we reach out to help. We are learning what it means to be pilgrims on our way to heaven; our child has gone on ahead. Meantime, life goes on and can become happy and rewarding again. We still carry the pain but, as someone wisely said, “Pain is essential; misery is optional.” We are learning the way out of misery.

I like to remember that in the opening book of the Bible, Genesis, Adam and Eve become the first bereaved parents. And that Mary, the most perfect of mothers, had to witness the death of her Son. How can we doubt that God understands and has budgeted for our griefs? Jesus Himself is a ‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,’ His Holy Spirit, who comes to dwell in us, is called “The Comforter.”

The lady who dropped me the note that day in the restaurant had left town when I called her number, but many others are finding help. Thanks, Lord, for giving me that push.

Peggy Balfour ~ TCF Canada
written in memory of her son David