The Compassionate Friends: Three Decades of Sharing and Caring: Joe Lawley and Iris Lawley

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
The Compassionate Friends: Three Decades of
Sharing and Caring (pre-recorded)
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guests: Joe and Iris Lawley
January 12, 2006

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. We have a very special show today honoring The Compassionate Friends organization and its founders, Iris and Joe Lawley. The Compassionate Friends is the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world and the topic of our show today is The Compassionate Friends, Three Decades of Sharing and Caring. On this show, Iris and Joe Lawley are joining us from Coventry, England. The Lawleys will discuss the death of their son, Kenneth, in 1968 and their meeting with Simon Stephens, assistant chaplain at the Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital in Coventry, England. From this fortuitous meeting began The Compassionate Friends. Joining us later will be Pat Loder, the executive director of The Compassionate Friends in America. All shows are archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org and www.health.voiceamerica.com websites. You can also contact me through my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org. Again, the topic of our show today is The Compassionate Friends, Three Decades of Sharing and Caring. It’s a real pleasure and honor for me to introduce my special guests, co-founders along with Rev. Simon Stephens of The Compassionate Friends. Welcome Iris and Joe.
I&J: Thank you.
G: Good to finally get you on the show. We had kind of a mishap a month and a half ago or so.
J: Well, here we are.
G: And what is it, 7:00 p.m. there in England?
I: Yes, it’s 7 o’clock in the evening.
G: And we’re here 11 o’clock in California. It’s so great to have you. I guess I could call you the founding family or the first family of Compassionate Friends.
I: Well, there were two founding families, actually. The other couple whose son was dying at the same time as Kenneth was in the hospital. So it was the Hendersons and the Lawleys.
J: We came together as a source of friendship from which Simon Stephens spotted that we were helping each other.
G: And he was a reverend there, a minister at the hospital?
I: Yes, Simon was the young hospital chaplain, and our son Kenneth had been on his bicycle waiting to turn the corner into school when he was struck by a car and he was unconscious and he was in the hospital. He never regained consciousness. This was a Tuesday and Simon came and stood by us and said, “Is there anything I can do to help?” And we asked him if he would say a prayer for Kenneth, and while he prayed for Kenneth, he said, “And for Billy.” And when he had finished the prayer, we asked, “Who is Billy?” And he said, “he’s another young boy, a 12-year-old boy dying in this hospital of cancer.” And we had never realized back then in 1968 that children died of cancer. So what happened then, our son died on the Thursday night and we saw in the newspaper that young Billy had died on the Saturday. I couldn’t stop thinking about this mum who had watched her son die for nine months, and I said to Joe, “Let’s send some flowers.” So we just sent flowers and said from Kenneth’s family because we thought that Simon would have also mentioned Kenneth to the Hendersons.
J: And I’ve often believed that that particular act was in fact the founding movement, if you like, for The Compassionate Friends because it brought us together. The Hendersons invited us around to have a cup of tea with them, which is a good old British institution, and in their presence, we of course discovered the great truth of The Compassionate Friends around which it’s built and that is that nobody can help you quite so much as another believing parent or parents and in their company and in no one else’s company, we had the freedom to speak and to listen to what they had to say and they listened to what we had to say.
G: And be able to hear it.
J: That’s right. And Simon spotted this.
G: Now Simon himself had had quite a background.
J: He had indeed. He had suffered tremendous bereavement himself, yes.
I: He never told us that for a very long time, and we didn’t realize at the time what he had suffered and we didn’t hear of it for quite some years really.
G: He actually wrote a book about it, right?
I: We also never knew. He never told us except when I was on a bus with him to the first gathering in England, he told me that our son Kenneth had died on his birthday.
G: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my. Now, both of his parents died, right?
J: And his sister.
I: And his sister and brother.
G: Was it in an accident?
I: He was in an accident. I believe he was about 16 and it was parent’s night at the school, and he asked his parents to come with him and they weren’t too keen. He said, they weren’t too keen but he sort of said, “Oh, you must come.” So they all got in the car, drove off to the school, and a very large petro truck hit the car, went right over the car. They were all killed except Simon who was in the hospital for a very, very long time. And Simon had no family, no relations at all. And this is when, I think after he recovered, he took himself off to Africa and this is what brought him into the church and this is how he understands how we feel.
G: Right, and he is right now, we’ll just mention him briefly, he is in Russia, right?
J: Yes. He’s chaplain to the British Embassy, and he’s also the Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal envoy to the Grand Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
G: So he is doing wonderful work wherever he goes.
I: When he was in the Navy, he was the chaplain on the Art Royal, and of course when he was traveling to various places he used to meet with bereaved parents so really he started the group in some remote places.
G: Oh, he’s really kind of the international beacon.
J: Yes, international missionary.
G: So tell us about your first group that actually got together.
J: Well, Simon saw that the Hendersons and we were helping each other so he asked us if we thought it would help others. We said, well, we will try. So he called a meeting. He wrote to 20 parents whose children had died in the hospital that year to come to a meeting. On the evening there was only Joan and Bill Henderson, Joe and I, and one other lady, Betty Ruskin, who had turned up. So we sat around a table in the nurse’s home and we decided that we would go out and try to help and we sat there. We gave it a name. In those days, we gave the name of the Society of The Compassionate Friends, and I made the first visit and we just went along with a bunch of flowers, knocked on the door, and said we understand you’ve lost a child, so have we. And we were invited in and they were just so desperate to have someone to talk to because we could talk together, we could cry together, and we could laugh together and remember the children.
G: Right. And they could also see that you were able to get yourself around and that you weren’t crazy or that you maybe were crazy but you were able to get around.
I: No, that’s right. I think people outside the group thought we were crazy. But I would like to say that the first visit I made and Simon didn’t tell me anything about this family, he just said the little boy had been run over, and I went along, and they were a black family, and I thought, “Are they going to accept me because I’m white?” I didn’t think the other way around but they were so pleased to see me and I realized then that you could be any color in the world and any religion and it just didn’t matter. We were as one.
G: That’s one thing that’s wonderful about the internet that we could talk now and people can access us from all over the world. It’s a beautiful thing.
I: Yes, because we didn’t have that all these years ago but it’s wonderful now because people, even if we can’t go to group meetings, they can talk together.
J: Another thing, of course, which was very important at that time, was that Simon seemed to get something like a sabbatical from his roles as a churchman to travel up and down the U.K. and everywhere he went, he was met by a small group of bereaving parents. He was able to establish small groups in each of these places and he would use a sort of reference, get in touch with the Coventry people, they know how this works. And so from the basis of the first Coventry group, which grew to quite a size up and down the country, smaller groups were starting to form and then before long we had a network, and from that time on, we’ve kept this sort of structure going.
G: Now how would people get in touch with you? I know I was over in England. My husband has an office there and I called and got an answering machine and could have left my name and they would have gotten in touch with me. Do you have people hired over there or is it all volunteer now?
I: The Bristol office, our head office, is in Bristol and they have a help line and they can get in touch there.
J: They cover sort of an immediate help line from normal working hours and they have a network of forlorn help lines late into the evening all up and down the country so that you can get very quickly into contact with people reasonably near to you who will then of course do what we all do and that is listen, and then from then on, refer you possibly to somebody a bit nearer who will either come and see you or will give you a telephone contact number and they will follow that up and again in most cases they will take you along to a small group meeting or some other get together like that so that you begin to meet other bereaved parents which is really the key to how we work. We are not trained counselors or anything like that. We are simply parents who have lost a child. The way that we speak to each other just comes naturally. We don’t have to be coached or taught. We just know what to do and we know how to speak because it just pours out when we listen to other people and we can respond.
G: Joe, you and Iris have been involved for quite some time in the organization. That is a wonderful thing for you to hang in with it and to let people know that they can make it as you know.
I: Well, I just feel that our children didn’t die in vain because all this has become right of it. There could have been nothing and we could have all been alone, but I just feel that all our children have pushed people on to do this through the love we had for them and the love they had for us.
G: That’s a great thought. Well, let’s go out to break now. We’re coming up on break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and please stay tuned to hear more about the topic of our show today, The Compassionate Friends, Three Decades of Sharing and Caring, and I’m talking with Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mother and dad, who are joining us from Coventry, England. Iris and Joe are the co-founders along with Rev. Simon Stephens of The Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. You can get CDs of Healing the Grieving Heart and you can purchase them through The Compassionate Friends organization or by calling 877-969-0010. All shows are archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org and www.health.voiceamerica.com websites and you can also get me through my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org. Please stay tuned for more.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and my guests today are Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mom and dad, who are joining us from Coventry, England. Iris and Joe along with Rev. Simon Stephens are founders of The Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. Well, Iris and Joe, welcome back. When we took a break, we were discussing the organization and how it operates in England, and I was wondering, one of the things I’m very interested in you two is that as a couple together, Kenneth was killed in what year was it?
J: 1968.
G: 1968 and you two actually – was it both of you that were interested in getting involved or more than the other or do you see any differences between men and women that you see in England getting involved?
I: Well, we were very fortunate. Joe and I shared everything. Maybe one day I’d be absolutely desperate and Joe was the strong one, and Joe would be having a bad time, and I would be the strong one to help. We helped each other so we were very fortunate. I know of some couples don’t have this, which is very sad, the one who is the other way and the other who is the other way. But I think with Compassionate Friends, it has really helped a lot. Joe could tell you more about the man’s point of view than I can.
J: Well I felt, particularly when we had this first meeting with Simon and the five of us together that he was proposing something that seemed to me to be absolutely tuned in to how we were feeling. As I said earlier, we somehow didn’t want Kenneth’s death to be absolutely of no value. We wanted it to mean something, and when he suggested this, it was an inspirational call to just go out and do something. We didn’t quite know what we were going to do but we sensed if we could get face to face with another bloody couple, it would simply come to us.
G: Well, Joe, you just said something that keyed in to some of the things that I’ve heard about men. You said it was something that we could go out and do and that’s one of the things that I’ve heard some of my guests and some other men talking about is men do like to feel like they’re going to be able to do something. Does that resonate with you?
J: Oh indeed. Once we caught on to the point that Simon was trying to make, that unbeknown to us really, we were helping another couple and they were helping us and, therefore, would it work for other people? We knew then that that being the case and it was working for us, we simply had to try this to see whether we went, as Iris described, to someone completely unknown to us, strangers, and simply be able to say to them, we understand you’ve lost a child and so have we and we’re from The Compassionate Friends. We had to see whether this was the magic that would get us invitations into people’s houses and later on when we were in big groups, whether this in fact would be the same kind of approach that when a newcomer came into the group, you had simply to say that you were another bereaved parent.
G: Were you kind of amazed that it worked?
J: Oh, yes. I’ve always been staggered the way this has worked because we stumbled onto this truth. Now other organizations and other fields have also stumbled onto truths like this but in our case, it stood up and made me feel completely amazed that this simple truth that you could help another person based on your own grief and your understanding of their grief, and because you could say the magical words, “I understand,” nobody but nobody else could say this, and that was a reassuring thing another bereaved parent or family wanted to hear.
I: I never dreamt it would grow like this and sadly it has grown, I mean nobody wants to join this group. The fact that it is this group, I know we’ve saved a lot of marriages; we’ve saved a lot of life through the world, everybody doing the work. It’s just been wonderful. The one thing I wanted to say is that a lot of men don’t like – it’s all this stiff upper lip, especially in Britain, and I think this was a good thing that Joe and some of the other men could help each other and bring them in because so many people say to the men when they’ve gone back to work, “How’s your wife?” They don’t say, “How are you?” And of course the men loved their children just as much as the mums did, so I think that was a very good thing that there’s a men’s group as well.
G: Now do you have a separate men’s group or do you meet together?
I: Well, personally, Joe and I began all these years ago and of course we’re in our seventies now, we don’t have a group of our own, but we always get invited to other groups and we’re always here to help. The magic of The Compassionate Friends is if someone is newly bereaved, they can share and help each other. Joe and I still miss Kenneth every day in our life and we still can get to cry at certain things but we’ve gone on all these years and what I always say, the open bleeding wound is now a scar. It has healed so slightly so that I feel that bereaved parents who are newly bereaved can help each other better. Do you know what I’m trying to say?
G: Yes, I hear what you’re saying because they’re close to it. I know it’s been 22 years for me.
I: If somebody had said to me when I was first bereaved, “my child died 30-odd years ago,” I would think, oh, my goodness. Are you still, is it still going to be like this? But of course, it isn’t. Gradually, gradually, gradually, slowly, you heal.
G: And someone was saying to me the other day on the show, you start learning from your grief, too, they’re wonderful lessons as you get down the path. Well, I wanted to ask you, do you see any attitudes different since 1968 as far as death goes in Britain?
J: I think there is a much more open approach to this and a better understanding. For instance, Iris and I were talking today about the fact that it’s a recognized thing that if you suffer a bereavement like this that you now speak about this quite openly. You yourself are not going to go and hide your head under a bush or whatever the expression is. You’re going to speak about this to your friends. In the time when we were first bereaved, your friends for all the best reasons in the world wanted to shut you up after about the first seven days. We were too overwhelming for them. But nowadays, I think there is a very great realization that leave people unaffected by bereavement themselves but nevertheless a human side to themselves which when they approach us, if you like, befriended by somebody who has lost a child, they can listen, they can help, and they can put their arms around you. Do all the basic human things. So I think there has been a major change in this country and I suspect in every country where The Compassionate Friends have bothered people, stuck our face in their faces, say we are The Compassionate Friends and we know all about child bereavement. Not in a big-headed way, but simply that we’ve experienced this.
G: Yes, I know the United States and England have been very forthcoming with the hospice programs and things like that so I think things are better. Well, we’re coming up on break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and please stay tuned to hear more about the topic of our show today, The Compassionate Friends, Three Decades of Sharing and Caring, and I’m talking with Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mom and dad, who are joining us from Coventry, England. Iris and Joe are the co-founders along with Rev. Simon Stephens of The Compassionate Friends, the largest, non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley, and my guests today are Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mom and dad, who are joining us from Coventry, England. Iris and Joe along with Rev. Simon Stephens are founders of The Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. If you’d like to email me about this show or upcoming shows, you can email me through my website, www.healingthegrievingheart.org. These shows are archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org website as well as www.health.voiceamerica.com website. We’re back from break and at this time we’ve got the Lawleys on and also Pat Loder, the Executive Director of Compassionate Friends in the United States, I believe is on with us. Is that right, Pat, are you there?
P: Hello, Gloria. Hello, Iris and Joe. I just wanted to call into the show and say hi to these wonderful people.
G: I’m so glad you called in. We were just talking about The Compassionate Friends in England and the founding and all the wonderful things. Iris was just telling me, she is also a bereaved grandparent.
P: Yes, they are.
I: And that was very difficult, Gloria, really, really hard because I couldn’t take my daughter’s pain away. I knew what she was going through and I couldn’t take that away. I could only be there for her and I find that very difficult. But, fortunately, she’s with the SAM’s Group and she does a lot of work for them so again, the young girls together, they’re sharing the same things has helped her quite a lot.
G: And how long ago was that?
I: Well, our baby was called “Buttercup” because she didn’t want to call her “it” so she always said Buttercup before she was born, and she would be seven now, but she was a still birth which was very sad. She was an 8-pound perfect baby but there was a lot of neglect at the time I’m afraid.
G: So there are a lot of things that happen in our lives that we have to live through. We were talking about men in grief and I also wanted to ask, the Lawleys and Pat Loder, do you think there’s a difference in grieving between the United States and England? Or Europeans and Americans?
I: Well, I think the Americans and Canadians, the people we have met, they’re much more open. They’re much more able to talk and to hug and to speak about their children and share with you. I think it’s getting better here but Britain is this stiff-upper-lip stuff. But I think it’s getting better here, hopefully, anyway, because of work that we’ve done and other groups have done. I think people are ready to listen, but I think that I personally think the Americans are much more open.
G: Do you have any comment on that Joe, what are your thoughts?
J: Well, I feel what Iris has said, of course, is exactly right. But I do notice that when we are together, the different nationalities, there is no difference at all. We all have the same spontaneous desire to come together to hug each other, to cry together, and I think that whatever reticence, the male being part of the British character, The Compassionate Friends has quietly whittled away at this so in fact that nowadays, as I said earlier, it is the expected thing that if in fact you are a bereaved parent and you meet another bereaved parent, you will do the one thing that nobody else can do. You can put your arms around them, a complete stranger. You can hug them. You can speak to them. You can invite them to tell you about their child and you can sit there and you can listen. And I think this is the common thing throughout the world.
G: Yes, which is an interesting thought because some of the different problems that are going on in the world, they’re still bereaved parents, aren’t they, no matter what?
J: Yes, exactly, and I feel that ultimately The Compassionate Friends will have a role to play in that. We stand back here and we watch the kind of world devastation either natural or by welfare of families and people and children and all the rest of it, and at the moment we are largely not able to do a lot, but I think myself in the long term, Compassionate Friends will.
G: And Pat, what did you think of it? Do you see the Europeans a little different than Americans?
P: Well, I have to say that Joe is absolutely right. In this organization, we connect with the heart. It doesn’t matter what nationality or race or anything if your child was old or young or male or female, we connect with the heart with another bereaved parent and we feel compelled to put our arms around them and share their pain with them.
I: Yes, I believe that among bereaved parents, but what I was talking about was outside the bereaved parents, you know, there are still those stiff upper lips.
G: But it’s interesting that the organization started in England, isn’t it? Very interesting where maybe England is the place where something like this would start because like you say, there’s the idea that you can invite people in for a cup of tea and take a moment and there’s a wonderful community. I go to Europe quite a bit, England, and there’s a wonderful kind of a little slower pace with a little more community I think.
J: That’s why I like to harness the Americans and bring them aboard anything.
I: And, of course, there were three Scots and two English that started this.
G: And now is there a lot of the organization in Scotland?
I: Oh, yes, there’s a big organization in Scotland now. Yes, we go up there to their conference so that’s good.
J: We go back for a top off of our Scottishness, you see. We speak the language.
I: Because John Henderson came from London and Bill Henderson came from the north of Scotland. How the others understood each other, I’ll never know, but I think that helped, too, with Bill Henderson. He was quite a shy man but always a Scot; they became quite good friends and were able to talk about the boys a lot.
G: Now tell me, did you see what happened when Harriet Schiff went on The Donahue Show in 1977? I know it was kind of an explosion in the United States wasn’t it, Pat?
P: It absolutely was, yes, absolutely, it really started The Compassionate Friends, the growth of The Compassionate Friends organization from that single show.
G: Now, did you notice that in England? Were you aware of it all?
J: We weren’t very well informed about this, but I’ve always recognized, or we’ve always recognized just exactly what she did. I often feel a slight amount of regret about one thing and that was that she pinched the title which I was planning to use on my book, The Bereaved Parent, but with all the good that she did, I gracefully hand over the title to her. But she did a wonderful thing and, of course, that talk show that she was on was so well broadcast throughout America, it had a devastating effect.
G: Now, did they show The Donahue Show in England?
J: No, they didn’t, and I often wish I could see that show, and in fact I keep meaning to try and get hold of her books as well, but I’d like to read what she delivered on that show.
G: Well, Pat, has anybody got any tapes of that show?
P: We do. We absolutely do.
I: That’s good because we don’t get these shows, you see.
G: Now, have you been able to do any media things in England?
I: Oh, in the past, we’ve done a lot. We’ve been on television quite a lot. We’ve got the television crew here for whole days and we’ve booked on Women’s Hour and we had various people come from various magazines which has been a help because they always publish the name and the number so we have done a lot in the past.
G: That’s great. Well, I’m not sure and maybe Pat and you might all know, what kind of numbers do we have here? I don’t know, there are 600 chapters in the U.S., is that right?
P: Nearly 600.
G: And how about in England?
J: Well we always bandy around a figure of about 300. I think we’ve taken not only what you call chapters we call branches. But I contact people on smaller groups as well. So it’s of that order of figure that we have about 300 of these groups.
G: And how about around the rest of Europe?
J: Well, it’s slowly growing. Of course, when you cross into Europe, you’re immediately speaking a different language of languages. You’re also thinking about difference cultures, so it’s quite common for other groups who spring up are roughly identified with Compassionate Friends type of thinking but what we call something else. But we have this, particularly some good friends, in places like Holland and Switzerland and Germany and France who are in fact within Compassionate Friends have started a similar group in their own country.
G: That’s great. Well, do you hear from Europeans, Pat?
P: We do and we just recently at the international gathering of Compassionate Friends that we had in Vancouver put together an international council so we we’re better able to stay in touch with one another also. So those kinds of things will help us in the future as the organization grows.
I: Of course, all the Christmas cards have been arriving from all over the world.
P: Ah, it’s great, isn’t it?
G: That’s a lovely thing. Well, listen, Pat, thanks a lot for calling in and it’s time for our final break and did you want to say something to the Lawleys?
I: All our love, Pat.
J: Love, Pat, and to Wayne.
P: All my love to you. These are just absolutely remarkable people that when dealing with the worst time or the worst thing in their life, they were able to assist countless peoples around the world in their grief and I love them dearly.
J: And we love you.
G: Thanks for calling in, Pat. It’s time for our final break and I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley and please stay tuned to hear more from the topic The Compassionate Friends, Three Decades of Sharing and Caring. I’m talking to Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mom and dad, founders along with the Rev. Simon Stephens of The Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. Please stay tuned to hear more from Iris and Joe Lawley, Kenneth’s mom and dad, who are joining me from Coventry, England. This show is archived on www.thecompassionatefriends.org website plus my website www.healingthegrievingheart.org and www.health.voiceamerica.com website. Please stay tuned to hear more from Joe and Iris and we’ll be back from our final break, and when we get back, Joe and Iris, I’d like to know if there’s anything that you feel like we’ve missed or comments that you’d like to make. Please stay tuned.
Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley. My guests today are Iris and Joe Lawley, whose 11-year-old son, Kenneth, was killed in a bicycle accident in 1968. Iris and Joe, who are joining us from Coventry, England, along with Rev. Simon Stephens founded The Compassionate Friends, the largest non-profit self-help bereavement organization in the world. Welcome back, Iris and Joe. When we went to break, I was asking you if you thought there was anything we missed that you’d like to comment on before our show ends.
I: I would just like to say that we are all really special people, bereaved parents, and I’ve got many friends but the friends I’ve made in Compassionate Friends are the closest and best people I’ve ever met. You’re just as one. You can meet someone for the first time and right away you’re close, you’re friends, and this is what I love about it. Obviously, we’d all want our children back if we could have that but that’s not to be, and we have had such a wonderful life with meeting other people, and that’s how I feel.
G: Yes, you kind of cut of right to the basics, don’t you, the basics of life when this happens to you, and people are very real. My husband calls them the angels.
J: And I would like to add that for all the bereaved parents who may very well be listening to your show, I would encourage them to make contact with The Compassionate Friends as soon as they possibly can, as soon as they feel right about this, because I think within The Compassionate Friends family, they will find the support and if I might even use the word the love that will sustain them and help them through their grief.
G: Now do you have any special rituals or things that you’ve heard that people have done, particularly; we’re into the holiday season. By the time this show airs, we’ll just be right out of the holiday season, but do you have any ideas for people taking care of themselves, it may be the better thing because the holidays will have ended and people will probably be pretty exhausted.
I: Yes, it’s a difficult time. I always say just do what your heart tells you to do; really, it’s difficult for me to tell other people what to do.
G: What do you do? Do you have any special rituals?
J: An example of what we do, we’d in fact taken the attendance about a week ago at a candlelight service specifically for bereaved parents and then today, Iris and I went and we got a small Christmas tree on the grave of our granddaughter and when we were there, we always make a point of talking to them. This is one of the other things that Compassionate Friends does. It encourages you not to think of your children as dead, but still part of your family but in another place and therefore you would speak to them normally and try and convey to them the love that you have for them.
G: Right, that’s lovely.
I: Kenneth always wanted us to have another child and he even had me write to Viet Nam when all the children were left without parents to try and adopt one, but that wasn’t to be. But we always say to take care of Buttercup, Kenneth, because we know he’s got his baby that he wanted and we talk like that and we light candles, of course, we light candles on Christmas Day and on the birthdays and we just think of them as still with us, really.
G: Well, yes, certainly they are, and one of the things that we’re talking about right now in the United States and some of the new writing and research that’s been going on is talking about something called, rather than talking about acceptance of the loss, talking about continuing bonds. How do we continue with them in our lives?
I: We continue because you don’t take that there ever.
J: Another thing that Compassionate Friends has done has encouraged people to be open about that. If that’s how they feel, let them express it because they’ll be listening to people who won’t necessarily agree with them but will be very understanding and sympathetic to that and I think this is a thing that again we are trying to quietly in our ways broaden the scopes also of Compassionate Friends to lay people, people unaffected by death, and to let them understand that this is how bereaved parents are and what they’re seeking, this particular continuing bond for the children.
G: Right, absolutely, and finding ways that we can serve other people is something that comes up for me with you because one of the things we’ve talked about too is how Compassionate Friends gives you a little later on, maybe, early on you need to take care of yourself, but after a year or two, you can start doing little service projects. And even early on you can bring a cookie or do something like that but it does give you the opportunity to help other people.
I: And it brings in to realize that there’s lots of volunteer work you can do and you get a lot from that. What you’re giving, you receive so much more back, and I think it makes you more knowledgeable about various things like that, whether you’ve never thought about it before. That you get more caring, definitely more caring than everyone else.
G: And more understanding and more empathy, compassion. Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. If you had one tip if you can remember way back to give a newly bereaved parent, what would it be?
I: Just to keep talking to other people who understand. Reach for help, don’t just sit on your own and share. You’ve just got to share.
G: And tell your story, I think early on, particularly.
J: Oh, that’s right, yes.
I: And write. People get a lot of help from writing it down if you can’t open up and talk but just write it all down. Write your thoughts down. That’s a big help.
G: Well, I must say, having you here from England is so fabulous and it just talks about what an international thing is and the organization and how it’s an amazing thing. It’s a miracle. It’s amazing.
I: It is. I think somehow it was all meant to be.
G: And now with the internet we can talk about it and hopefully people will tell their friends and pick up these archived shows so they can hear other people talk about it.
J: The internet goes to be a very, very big tool in Compassionate Friends. It already is, of course, but it fulfills one of the things that have always worried me. I’ve always had this worry that some people slip through the net and we never get to them or they never get to us. I think the end to that will largely knock out on our head. Someone somewhere in a family, not necessarily the grieving parents themselves, but their siblings or their friends, they will do what we all do now. Let’s go on the internet and see what there’s something about child bereavement and, of course, Compassionate Friends will surface right way.
G: Well, thank you so much for being on the show and I hope to have you on this show again and it’s been wonderful talking to you from England and it’s time to close our show today. Iris and Joe Lawley, founders of The Compassionate Friends, it’s been fabulous having you on and all the service you’ve done for all these years is so wonderful.
I & J: Thank you, Gloria, it’s been lovely.
G: Please stay tuned again next to hear Professor Bob Baugher, psychologist, author, and certified death educator. Bob has given more than 350 workshops on coping with grief and loss. He is a highly sought after speaker and with his humor and insightfulness, he will be able to help you with your grief. Dr. Baugher is not to be missed. Please visit my website at www.healingthegrievingheart.org or email me at the same address. This show is archived on www.health.voiceamerica.com as well as www.thecompassionatefriends.org websites. This is Dr. Gloria Horsley. Please stay tuned again next Thursday at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time, 12:00 Eastern, for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope and renewal and support. Remember others have been there before you and made it. You can too. You need not walk alone. Thanks for listening. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria Horsley.