Recently a friend who listens mentioned that he wished I would post the transcripts of my podcasts. He said sometimes he hears something but he's not sure he heard me right or he hears something and he just wants to see it in the written form. So I wanted to take a moment to make sure anyone who listens knows that all the transcripts for all the podcasts are on my website seanjeung.com. As well as some other stuff, not a lot of other stuff but some other stuff, like my email address and the ability to buy me a cup of coffee if you like the work and would like to help support it that way. So if you haven't been to the website, or if it's been awhile, check it out. 

And please pass it along to anyone you can think of who might benefit from these stories.

Today's piece is titled Nine Women. 

The decision to do my first grief support group came from necessity more than any desire I had to begin offering groups.

I was working for that small rural hospice I have spoken of before, as one person who wore many hats. I was the Chaplain, the Volunteer co-ordinator and the bereavement co-ordinator. 

When one patient, in hospice, dies, family members are then added to the bereavement mailing list. Sometimes home visits are made to the family. At the very least phone calls are made and depending on need, might continue for many months and might include multiple family members. A phone call that could be as quick as leaving a gentle message of love and support or as long as an hour long listening session as a loved one tries to find language for this thing they have no language for. So as the agency grew the bereavement program began to grow as well, until it was mushrooming exponentially. Even with a team of volunteers to send the monthly mailings and help make many of the follow-up phone calls, I was having trouble keeping up. And, I believe in the power of group work. Offering my first grief support group turned out to be one of the many blessings I was graced with in my time with hospice.

I knew I wanted to create a place of safety where people could take a breather from the normal duties of their day; where they would find the refuge of a listening ear and an understanding heart. A place to bring that which they no longer wanted to carry alone. 

Group work felt natural to me. And my first group taught me so much about the conversations necessary to help establish a sense of safety and trust. I've said before how grateful I am to every person who has ever trusted me with their story. But that first group, a circle of women who's stories will always be with me, will be remembered for so much more than their stories. I can still visualize, so clearly, the room and the circle of chairs; the candle light and the tears and eventually the laughter and the hugs and the ease with which they would hold hands at the end of our meetings to collectively extinguish the one candle burning in the center of our circle of chairs.

And I remember, at the close of that first night, driving home in the dark, on an isolated stretch of interstate between my home and the town where the group was being offered and weeping tears of gratitude for having found something that felt like a second skin. 

Today, I want to share some of what that night brought to my life and why I feel like I owe them so much.

It is a Tuesday at 6PM. The meeting room is peaceful, carpeted, softly lit and private. It is an interior room without windows, a walled off part of a much larger conference room at a local hospital.

I have 10 comfortable arm chairs in a large circle. On each chair is a bottle of water. In the middle of the circle a small low table covered with a beautiful scarf and on the table a candle. The scarf had belonged to my mother. It was my way of inviting her into this circle because I knew I wanted her there and I also knew I needed her there.

The candle is lit. Tissue boxes are at the leg of every other chair giving easy access to anyone wanting or needing one. A small CD player on the floor by my chair is quietly playing American Indian flute music.

As I sit and wait, I wonder for the millionth time what the evening will hold. In order to gain access to the place I wanted to hold this 6 week group, I needed to make the group open to anyone and it oddly happened that this group was made up of individuals not associated to a hospice death, people from the community who had seen the ad in the paper and registered to come. So, I was unfamiliar with the names on the list of those I was expecting to meet. 

I was very aware as I sat and waited of the effort it was taking to stay calm and unattached to the outcome of the evening. 

Surrendering to the 'not knowing what to do' helps me. Especially, when I don't know what to do. 

So I am sitting there just breathing, when I hear voices in the hallway and I know they have arrived. 

I had been very intentional about this group, a habit I would carry into every group ever offered. I had put a lot of time and thought into how I might best achieve the goal of helping them feel safe and, if I am being honest, which I am, I very much wanted to ensure that they would all come back for week two.

Once all 9 participants had arrived I closed the doors to the room and returned to my seat. 

I introduced myself and gave a short biography of how I had come to be working with hospice, and thus, how I had become interested in working with those who are in grief. And then I asked if we might all take a moment to introduce ourselves and if able and willing, to share what event had occurred in their lives to bring them to be sitting there with me that night.

This was the group that I cut my teeth on, they are the ones who taught me that the first meeting of any group where the focus is grief, will take the entire time to do what I had just asked them to do. I had advertised the meetings to be 2 hrs long every Tuesday for 6 weeks. My groups from then on were always scheduled for 2 hours. That first night every minute of it was taken up just in introducing ourselves to one another. 

That first night, as I facilitated my first grief support group ever, I met grief in a way I had never met it before; head on, raw, old and crusty, hot and molten, paralyzed and running freely. I met grief on that razors edge of sharpness and could feel the fear some of them had that it would kill them if they really let themselves fall into it. 

I met grief that had laid waste to a mothers heart and a grandmothers heart and a sisters heart. And it changed my life. That night changed me. It set me in a new direction because I saw the enormity of the need for safe places to process loss. And, it was a need I believed I could make a difference in.

I sat in the presence of these women and listened to their words, watched them as they wiped away at tears that wouldn't stop, and waited with them in their silence. They had carried their losses alone and suddenly they were no longer alone. 

By the end of that first night, one woman who had been unable to speak when we were doing introductions shook her head and said, “OK. I'm ready” then proceeded to say she had lost her 16 year old son 6 weeks earlier. The unique circumstances of her loss would show themselves over the course of the next couple of weeks but his death was unexpected and to complicate everything even further this mother and her son's father had had to make the decision to remove him from life support. Sobbing she then told us that this night, 6 weeks after he had died, was the first time she had spoken the words out loud, that her son had died. 

This group of nine, taught me that grief comes wearing many disguises. That our lives are truly a series of losses until that ONE that gets our full attention; that one that creates such a dumpster fire of sorrow and fear and longing and mind numbing rage that we think it will swallow us whole. The darkness that often follows a significant loss is an unknown wilderness. Luckily I already knew that it was not my job to try to lead them out of that wilderness, not my job to try tell them how it will go or what they need to do. My job, was to be willing to walk into it with them and sit beside them. And it was in developing a trust that those who grieve will find their own way. All I could do was let them know they were not any longer alone in there.

This group of nine helped me see that grief work is sometimes work that needs to be done with others. Sometimes just in knowing that you are not alone, is enough to keep you going one more day. 

And, this group of nine taught me that the year I had spent going to workshops in Ft Collins to explore and learn about working with those who grief was some of the best use of my time ever. In fact, one of the thoughts I had driving home from that first night was to call Allan Wolfelt in Ft Collins and tell him how powerful the first night of this first group had been for me, to thank him for helping prepare me. But, I didn't, because, he already knows. And I hope he knows as well, that the energy he has put forth into the world to help groom others to hold space and guide people in the acuity of grief has paid off and will forever continue to pay off. Just as it was in a Toddler Montessori environment where the children will teach us what they need to know, what they are ready to learn, so it has been in so much of the grief work I've participated in. 

The ones doing the grieving are the best teachers. 

Whether sliced instantly to the quick or worn down over time, grief temporarily diminishes us. It unravels things about us that we thought were impenetrable, it mishandles our hearts and leaves a wake of uncertainty, with no apologies. It does not knock or ask permission to come in. It breaks down doors and floods our homes like a tsunami.

So, I purposefully designed my groups to give people who have shared loss, or losses, a safe place to come together for a few moments of respite. A place to breathe. A place to come and bring their tears, their silence, their rage or their disbelief and not have anyone question them or judge them. A place to lean their head on someones shoulder, metaphorically, with no need for explanation or even words of any kind. 

A sacred space where what can often happen is, a little bit of the burden they carried could be left right there in the room, inside the circle of light, where they trusted it to be safe until the following week when they could take a look at it again and decide if they were up to the challenge of carrying it or if they wanted to let it rest awhile longer.

These groups were a place where we would laugh and cry and refresh and renew.....And they were a place where we were reminded that we are not alone. 

I believe we heal best in community. Where we understand that our stories and our voices are part of the collective healing of humankind. For many of us, there is also healing that happens in solitude. On the days that I find myself in stillness and solitude, I know I can slowly peel off the layers of things that feel heavy, burdensome or old. They are often the best days of healing for me. But both are important. Healing requires community, ritual, ceremony and gratitude. Breathing can be a ritual. Silence is often it's own ceremony. But community if only found in numbers. Hidden in the smaller subgroups of larger communities, where people find themselves spending more time together, where richness is alive and laughter comes more easily, the places you might feel safest, that's where you will find healing.

Be aware, whenever you are able, of all the places that heal you. Create your availability to each of them, in the doses you need and with the understanding that you are not abandoning anything or anyone by being there.

It has been a great privilege for me to work in the lives of so many who grieve. A great privilege to bear witness to and hold space for so much anguish and pain. A great privilege to know that the world is a little bit better because of those who have chosen to dedicate themselves to bringing an awareness around grief to the forefront of our culture; dispelling falsehoods and normalizing the benefit to talking about the pain. 

I am humbled to be among them, and comforted to know it is an ever widening circle of practitioners who are seeing the benefits of exploring, unearthing, dusting off and honoring the losses in a persons life as a way to help them live their full potential of happiness.

This is SJ. As always, thank you for your time and I hope you will join me again WTVGT.