Group offers grieving parents some support

Unless your family has been affected by a horrific tragedy, chances are you have never heard of The Compassionate Friends.

“I never heard about it until my son died, and while we were leaving the hospital one of the nurses wrote down’ The Compassionate Friends’ on a piece of paper,” explained Joan Wallen, who currently co-leads the Rehoboth chapter with Hope Tyler.

“The last thing I wanted to do was even deal with it,” she said, “but several months later I looked it up and checked into it and found out that sometimes people who are trying to get through their life, and finding they’re not doing a very good job of it, realize that there are resources out there to help.”

The Compassionate Friends was founded more than 40 years ago in England, when a chaplain brought two grieving parents together. Watching them interact, he concluded the support they gave each other was far better than anything he could do. From that began The Compassionate Friends organization.

In 1978, a U.S. branch was established in Illinois. Today, The Compassionate Friends is in more than 30 countries around the world, with more than 600 chapters across the 50 U.S. states, as well as in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Their mission is simple: to “offer friendship, understanding and hope” to families – specifically parents – who have lost a child, no matter the child’s age.

The Lighthouse Chapter of The Compassionate Friends was started in Rehoboth some 12 years ago.

“There was a person whose daughter had died, and she started the local chapter and was involved with it for a short period of time. Then Hope Tyler and myself became co-leaders. We’ve done it for the last 10 years,” Wallen said.

Before the Lighthouse Chapter was started, the only Delaware chapter was in Brandywine. Parents from southern Delaware would have to travel up to two hours to go to a meeting that would have at least 100 people attending every month.

“One of the advantages of our group is, because we’re small, we do have an opportunity to get more out of a meeting, as opposed to being there with a large number of people,” Wallen said. “It varies from month to month. We can have anywhere from two people to 20.’

The group meets at 7 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month at Epworth United Methodist Church in Rehoboth. Meetings always have a topic. Depending on what time of year it is, it could deal with coping with holidays, getting through certain seasons or what people can do to honor the memory of their child.

“The meetings really evolve. You can go in there expecting to talk about one thing because that’s your topic and it goes the way the meeting goes. If we have new people, which we normally do every month, they are primarily the people who need the most help,” continued Wallen.

“They’ve never been there before, so they look to somebody across the row from them that might’ve had a child die the same way. A lot of people have had children die in car accidents – teenagers particularly. When you look at somebody else who’s been through it , you have the ability to get up the next day and to move on because that person lived through it, and maybe you can, too.”

Although their mission is to “assist families toward the positive resolution of grief,” the group is most focused on helping parents. While family members are welcome to attend, and often do, their main objective is to aid parents with the loss of their child.

“My son was 34 years old when he died,” shared Michael Tyler, editor of the chapter’s newsletter, whose wife is the chapter’s co-leader with Wallen. “Some people have lost a child when they were a baby, some people have lost children to drugs, or some people have lost children to suicide, so there’s different shades of guilt, of remorse, of grief, of anger, it just runs the whole gamut.

“So what we try to do is provide support and help for those individuals and provide some ideas, because we’ve been there; we know what it’s like. For someone who’s said, ‘Yeah, I lost my mother, I know how you feel,’ it’s not the same.”

“Anybody can come to the meetings,” noted Wallen, “but if you’re looking to come because it’s your grandmother that died, as opposed to your child that died, that’s not the focus of the meeting. It’s dealing with the death of a child.

“Sometimes we have whole families that come, where the grandparents come, the brothers and sisters come and the parents come, as well,” she pointed out. “We recently had a little 4-year-old girl who was killed in a car accident and they came with eight people. So the parents were there, but the whole family benefits from how you deal with it. “

The chapter publishes its own monthly newsletter, which is sent via post and e-mail to more than 65 people in the area. It includes birthdays, remembrances and poems, as well as information from the national organization and upcoming meetings.

“It’s a really valuable part of our group, because a lot of people never would come to a support group and talk, but the newsletter is a way for them to get information. There are different readings in there that people may find helpful, how they might deal with individual issues,” Wallen said.

The chapter does not charge parents a fee to participate in meetings, since their only expenses are the newsletter and the room rental. It is funded through a memorial tree, in which people can make donations to have ornaments hung on a tree.

The chapter raises most of its money through a candle-lighting ceremony. Held the second Sunday in December, The Compassionate Friends Worldwide Candle Lighting has friends and families light candles in memoriam, for one hour, at 7 p.m. local time to create, “a virtual wave of light, hundreds of thousands of persons commemorate and honor children in a way that transcends all ethnic, cultural, religious and political boundaries,” according to the organization’s Web site.

“It is amazing,” Wallen said, “We get 150 people who come every year in December to remember their children, and it’s international.”

The organization also has a national meeting each year at which they hold workshops and programs.

“It’s quite a moving experience when you see over a thousand bereaved parents talking. You know, some people have lost two, three children. It’s hard to believe. We have somebody in our organization who has lost two children. It’s not something you ever want to anticipate, losing one child, let alone two,” said Tyler.

Five years ago, the chapter donated a number of books on grief and dealing with the death of a child to the Lewes Public Library. The library has set up a section for the donated books but the books can also be ordered through other local libraries, through interlibrary loan.

“Lots of resources are there for reading, and all you have to do is walk in and ask where The Compassionate Friends section is, and they’re very familiar with it. I would say there are probably 50 books in there,” Wallen said. “That way we don’t have to worry about the administrative part of it. That’s one thing a lot of people benefit from, the reading of books, and there are some really good ones in there.”

Wallen emphasized that, regardless of a child’s age at their death, the issues parents deal with are often the same and Compassionate Friends wants to give them a support system.

“Having somebody else who’s had a similar situation talk with you, there’s some comfort in that. Maybe it’s … somebody else having been there that makes you feel as though they have more legitimacy than having a speaker who’s just read about it in a book.”

“The primary focus is sharing with each other,” she added. “So you could come in there and say, ‘When my child died, this was really helpful to me,’ or ‘This wasn’t helpful.’ ‘What do I do with my child’s clothes?’ ‘What do we do when people say nasty, irritating things that obviously they don’t think are nasty or irritating but can be to somebody who just lost a child?’”

Some parents attend several meetings and eventually stop going. And that’s just fine. The purpose of the meetings is to have people attend for whatever period of time they feel would best benefit them while dealing with their grief and to eventually be able to move on.

“Grief is a unique journey. Everybody deals with the loss of a child in his or her own way. Certainly men grieve differently than women. Some people have to have the support and have needs that our support group can provide. While others say, ‘I don’t need this. I’ll deal with it on my own.’ The journey is different for everybody who has lost a child.” Tyler said.

“Sometimes our suggestions are things that work and other times they’re not, because it’s so individual. What might work for you wouldn’t necessarily work for me. It’s just the knowledge that somebody else has lived through what you’re going through and how you come out at the other end,” said Wallen. “Not necessarily coming out feeling like you’ve left it behind, but how you cope with it. And how your life is different and changed, and how you go on.”

For more information, visit The Compassionate Friends Web site, at www.compassionatefriends.org, or contact Joan Wallen at (302) 226-1623. The Compassionate Friends Inc. may also be found on Facebook.