SYLACAUGA — Some residents are in the process of organizing a mutual assistance self-help organization called Compassionate Friends, which will offer friendship and understanding to bereaved families who have lost a child.With 600 chapters throughout the country, the group helps families deal with the loss of a child.
The meetings offer an atmosphere for families to express their feelings, with the hope of helping them realize that one day their lives will be better.
Pamela Smith, who has been instrumental in getting the Sylacauga chapter started, said she learned about the group when she lost her daughter in a car wreck in March 2006. She said she was devastated.
“I have driven to Montgomery and Birmingham to about six meetings,” Smith said. “I learned that it is OK to feel whatever I am feeling at the moment and that guilt is normal, whether earned or unearned.”
Smith realized that a chapter could be formed in Sylacauga, and other local families that had lost children could express their feelings as well.
She began talking to others in the community in an attempt to create interest in forming a chapter in Sylacauga.
A group of six people met Tuesday to organize the meeting and discuss requirements of the international chapter, which includes putting together an advisory committee that consists of a lawyer, doctor, hospice or funeral director, counselor or therapist.
They also established a time and location for meetings, which will be the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month at St. Andrews Episcopal Church at 8 W. Walnut St. in Sylacauga.
The first public meeting is scheduled for May 13.
“Attending the meetings, I have realized that I haven’t lost faith, but I am on a new course leading me to a new journey, and I hope our meetings will help others as well.” Smith said.
Debbie Danelutt, one of the six organizers of the chapter, lost her daughter Jennifer Danelutt in March 2002 and lost a second child, Ashley Danelutt, in December 2007.
“I attended Compassionate Friends meetings when my daughter Jennifer died and have recently begun to go back to the meetings when I lost Ashley,” Danelutt said. “The grieving process is so different for everyone and the group has helped me see there is no particular place I am supposed to be in my grieving process.”
Danelutt said she hopes the meetings will help others and give them a safe place to grieve.
“It is a long process when someone looses a child and it helps to talk about it,” she said. “We don’t expect to lose our kids, and when we have them we wrap our hopes and dreams around their happiness, and once they are taken from us, things are so different and we have to learn a whole new way of living.”
Compassionate Friends began in early 1968 in England when Simon Stephens, an assistant chaplain at a hospital in Coventry, England, was newly ordained and discovered he was not prepared for the challenge of helping a family that had lost a child. He discovered he was needed by not one family, but two.
Two families had children in the same hospital who died days apart and the families began communicating and sharing their feelings with each other. For the next year, Stephens remained in close contact with both couples and observed their friendship and encouragement. In 1969, six people, including Stephens, attended a meeting that was organized with the intentions of helping other bereaved families.
