Grieving with The Compassionate Friends

By Victoria R. Crosby

Last year I joined a club that nobody chooses to join, yet it is growing in numbers. The Compassionate Friends (TCF) is the name of an organization comprised of groups of bereaved parents who meet regularly for emotional support. I attended my first meeting in December of 2021, three months after the death of my youngest son, at the First Christian Church of Atlanta on LaVista Road in Tucker. The Compassionate Friends has been meeting at this church hall for over forty years. There are over five hundred chapters in all fifty states and in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam, and worldwide. Meetings are in Lawrenceville, Duluth, and Tucker. The groups are very diverse and every grieving parent is welcome.

TCF was founded in England in 1968 and as a nonprofit organization in 1969, at what was then the Warwickshire Hospital, now the University Hospital, Coventry, when two young boys died within days of each other, and the chaplain brought the two sets of grieving parents together. There are now chapters all over the world.

In December the forty-second annual candlelight memorial service was held for all the chapters to participate, at the First Christian Church of Atlanta. A memorial video of children whose families had submitted photos was shown while a pianist played beautiful music. Among the pieces were “Memory” from Cats, and the theme from the film Somewhere in Time.

Five Memory Candles on an altar were lit by a parent, each one representing a different emotion: Grief, Courage, Memories, Love, and Hope, as they read the words in the program that went with each memory candle. I was asked to read and light one of the candles, and I chose Hope as it was a short reading and my first time attending, so I was not sure I could read it without my voice breaking.

The speakers were a bereaved man and his daughter, the deceased young man’s sister. Everyone present was given a candle which they lit from one of the five larger ones and said the name of their child into the microphone.

A mass candle lighting, believed to be the largest in the world, is held on the second Sunday of December each year at 7 p.m. local time, creating a virtual twenty-four hour wave of light as it moves from time zone

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