Friends Remember Bereaved Mothers
Kathy Denenny always sends a Mother’s Day card to a friend who lost her only child.
The message: “I remember your child and that you were that child’s mother and always will be.”
“As a bereaved mother, the greatest gift you can give is to be willing to talk about that child,” Denenny said.
In the Compassionate Friends newsletter this month, a bereaved mother is described as “someone who wishes they would take Mother’s Day out of the calendar.”
Bloomsday is actually worse for Denenny because her family always ran with her son, Tim, who died in a 1991 boating accident at Spirit Lake at age 14.
A year after he died, Denenny and Janet Timmons revived the Spokane chapter of Compassionate Friends, an international support group for bereaved parents and relatives. She led meetings and produced the newsletter for five years. Louise Zaagsma leads the small chapter now. Chapters also flourish in Colville and Coeur d’Alene.
Members include the families of the estimated 95,000 people under age 25 who die annually. Mothers who’ve miscarried or had stillborn infants attend. Older parents come grieving the deaths of adult children. There is no formal counseling, just shared experiences.
Dee-Dee Updike walked into the monthly meeting at the Washington Trust Bank in the Spokane Valley recently and felt at ease for the first time since her daughter Michelle died last July in a car accident.
“It was the first time I was able to talk and know the person I was talking to understood every word I was saying,” Updike said.
Updike has a surviving daughter and is raising her 3-year-old granddaughter. But when she talks about Mother’s Day she begins to cry.
“I won’t have my first born. We won’t be able to hug or exchange flowers. My granddaughter will never give her mother a Mother’s Day card,” she said.
Such raw feeling can frighten friends into silence. They’re afraid any mention of the death will be upsetting.
“The reality is, you can’t upset her, she’s already upset,” Denenny said. “When my son died, if you cut me open what would flow from my veins would be, ‘My son was killed.’ That’s who I was, and that went on for years.”
Denenny’s outreach has moved beyond Compassionate Friends. Now, as leader of a program at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, she trains lay people to provide one-on-one ministry to people in need.
Over the years the area chapters of Compassionate Friends have evolved, but the core experiences stay the same. Grieving family members - mostly women - come to talk about the strangeness of life after death: their inability to remember things, for instance, or their anger.
Updike also said she left believing for the first time that there is light, not at the end of tunnel - “it never ends” - but in the tunnel.
“Light to find the way,” she explained. “To no longer be lost.”
, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Where to call For information: In Spokane, (509) 927-3911; for meeting times in Coeur d’Alene, (206) 765-1705; and Colville, (509) 684-6583.