MOUNT VERNON — St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church is hosting this year’s installment of the Seton Bereavement Ministry, but the eight-week program is ecumenical and open to all people of all faiths. It is meeting on Mondays at 7 p.m. in the church rectory, 303 E. High St., and runs through March 19. There is no charge to participate.
Julie Herman and Char Duffield are the ministry’s facilitators; both were trained by the Diocese of Columbus.
Said Herman, “We try to help people get over the loss of a loved one. We don’t stress that people have to pray. We’re not trying to convert anyone to Catholicism. And if you don’t want to share, you don’t have to ... sometimes it’s better to just listen.”
The programs focus on understanding feelings, including fear, hurt, anger — at the loved one who died, at God, others and at oneself — and depression, a stage of grief that can be most difficult, and how to handle those feelings productively. The literature stresses that “It is all right to question God and be angry at God. God knows what it is to suffer. Even Christ showed anger and asked when he was on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Anger is a part of a loving relationship with others; why not with God? God gave us our emotions, including anger.”
The Seton Bereavement Ministry began in January 2006 with a group of six. Herman wanted to become a facilitator following her experience of coping with the death of her husband, Ed, four years ago. They had been married 23 years.
“I was a basket case for four or five months,” remembered Herman. She found relief in the Passages program at Hospice of Knox County, and later told the Rev. Charles Thomas, the former parish priest at St. Vincent de Paul, “I need to reach out to people but I don’t know how. He said, ‘I think we need to start a bereavement group.’”
Duffield has also experienced grief, having lost her husband and her son within a period of five months in 2000.
She said, “It’s such a traumatic experience. I went to hospice for counseling; they teach you coping skills. I guess my problem was ... initially you are so numb ... I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. People feel like they are going crazy. You don’t know what is normal, or what to expect. So on the first day of the sessions, we go into that.”
“We say ‘crazy is normal,’” added Herman.
Lorraine Ferré, MSW, LISW, a local therapist in private practice, spoke to the first group in the winter of last year.
She said, “What you have started in this community is very much needed. When it comes to death, bereavement and grief, we need a variety of sources. It is vital because people will reach out to different sources. We are such a busy culture and we want to fix it and move on, but with grief you can’t fix it. You can’t take a pill.”
Said Herman, “I learned that there are ways to get around this [grief]. You have to let go of that old life and start a new one. It isn’t easy, though.”
Duffield explained that sometimes “other people have problems with your grief,” and tend to avoid the grieving person because they don’t know what to say or how to give comfort. She tells of a woman who lost her daughter to death and confided to Duffield, “All I wanted to do was talk about my daughter, and no one would mention her name.”
“If you can get into a group that will talk about these things,” said Duffield, “it is really helpful. I noticed that in our first group, people came in and they weren’t smiling; they were having trouble. But by the end of the eight weeks, they were in a better frame of mind. They were starting to smile and you felt they could cope with their situation a little better.”
Herman said, “People need to know that there is someone here for them who has gone through what they are going through.”
When plans were originally made for a bereavement group, Thomas suggested naming it in honor of the United States’ first saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton. Born in 1774 in New York, Seton converted to Catholicism in 1805, founded the Sisters of Charity and died in Maryland in 1821. The mother of five understood grief all too well — she lost two daughters at a young age, as well as her husband.