Families Together
On almost every evening during the week, families walk into the Highmark Caring Place. A mother and father with three kids. An eleven-year-old girl and her mother. A grandmother and a boy and a girl. A mother with five boys. A father and his young son.
The Highmark Caring Place, A Center for Grieving Children, Adolescents and Their Families is a child-focused, family-based program. Adults and children in a family come together to receive support from other grieving families and adult volunteers.
Kim and Ben discovered this when they began a session at the Caring Place last year. Kim and Ben's twelve-year-old son, Benjamin, had died suddenly just a few months earlier. As is common, their first concern was for their daughter. As Ben says, "We felt alone. We didn't know how we were going to make it. And most importantly, Amy, our eleven-year-old daughter, was also distressed. Kim and I were in a state where we couldn't give Amy the kind of help that she really needed, because we were too busy grieving ourselves."
Kim also showed a parent's very natural focus on her child. "In the days and weeks and months after Benjamin's death," she says, "we were very concerned about Amy, and her reaction to her brother's death. We came to the Caring Place looking for support for Amy. And we got so much more.
"We found a place where it was safe for all of us to grieve," Kim says. "Where people were comfortable to simply walk beside us."
In the peer support offered at the Caring Place, children and adults separate after their meal together to meet and talk with their peers. In this way, many feelings and memories are shared with new friends that are often too difficult to bring up at home. Finding a way to talk about their grief at the Caring Place often leads to more sharing at home. After the scary or difficult feelings are brought up safely the first time, they become easier to bring up again. Many families have reported that during the ride home after a session, children and adults opened up deeply to each other.
Ben quickly saw how important the sessions were to the entire family. "The Caring Place was very good for Amy because she was able to relate to the other children about the difficulty she was going through.
"But it was very good for us too. For the first time we could talk openly, we could weep openly, we could share grief with others who could understand exactly where we were coming from. We had people who cared about us. And helped us. No one ever told us how we should feel. It was just somebody who cared. People who listened and helped."
As the whole family found healing, they were better able to help each other.
When Cindy's husband died in early 1999, she was left with two adolescent girls. On top of the grief was the additional difficulty of a now-single parent raising two teenagers. Cindy is glad for the chance they all had at the Caring Place to share with other children, other parents. Expressing her feelings among people who understood was a lifeline for Cindy.
By having the entire family present week after week, the children and adults are getting the message that they are all important in this healing journey, that they need each other, that they can be there for each other. They're also experiencing the fact that, even after a tremendous explosion, the family does in fact still exist. Each member of the family is learning that all the others are important to their continuing growth.
