APRIL
My Dear Friends,
The first editorial letter I wrote for
this newsletter used the tragedy of 9/11 as an analogy of facet of the
grieving process. A few months ago I was at Ground Zero and once again
found messages for us there.
Some of the buildings surrounding the Twin Towers were so badly damaged,
they had to be imploded. Many have already been rebuilt and soar
triumphantly into the iconic New York skyline, stronger and more
awe-inspiring than before.
As for the WTC itself, it's still an enormous crater in the ground, but it's
not empty. Even on a Saturday morning of a holiday weekend, there were
bulldozers and cranes, front-end loaders and piles of building materials,
and many, many workers determined to complete the new tower and memorial.
Progress is behind schedule and there've been problems galore, but the will
to surmount all of that defies mere timetables. One day there will be
another fabulous attraction in the city, a monument to the past and a
commitment to the present and future.
Across one of the streets is the 9/11 Museum. Full of photographs and
posters, artefacts found on the tragic site, testimonies of the survivors
and is constantly aware of courage and selflessness. Many sacrifices
are there as reminders of how people stood together with love and support a
vibrant city that never sleeps.
Visitors are requested to comment on the
effects of these events. Pinned up all around the walls of the museum
basement are messages from adults and children, from the USA and the world.
There are common threads - admiration and praise for the brave and the good,
an understanding of the anguish still endured, a commitment to the building,
albeit in tiny ways, of a stronger better, kinder life.
We don't know why our personal edifices are torn apart and are unsure if
we are capable of building afresh. But as in New York, each
individual, every family, can and does eventually, construct new beautiful
futures. From tragedy must come truth and delight must follow despair.
The TCF family is proof of that; may you soon feel part of the renewal.
Much love,
Rosemary Dirmeik.
TCF Johannesburg
__________________________________
On the Occasion of our 25th Anniversary
and
Globe Lighting Ceremony
Held at TCF on Saturday Evening - 29 November 2008
By Bernard Levinson
There is a magic word that describes everything we are doing here this evening.
It is the Zulu word UBUNTU! I am your humanity and you are my
humanity.
When I look at cultures around the world, I am intrigued at the amazing
diversity in behaviour when it comes to grief - even the most basic question of
colour - in our culture black is considered the colour of mourning. In the east it
is white. The Japanese have no single word for grief. There is a word for
Sadness and a communal word for grief ….
In Egypt it is so important to cry, that there are professional criers, who are employed to fill all the spaces, with loud shrieks. In Bali crying is frowned upon. They are both Moslems, but the culture is different. What interests me, are the common denominators. How uniquely similar we are. In every culture, going back to our earliest Pagan roots, there is a need to light candles. The mystical flame, spreading warmth and light.
Also in every culture there is a need to take the lost children and keep them
inside oneself, where they can live forever.
And finally, the need to mark significant moments, to create rituals that
strengthen our bonds with our children and bring us all closer to each other.
This evening we are marking the most amazing moment. TCF has been in
existence, in Johannesburg, for 25 years. That's an astounding reality. For 25
years, parents who have lost children have been able to share their grief, in this
remarkable compassionate environment. It has grown from an office to this
splendid home. Some seven and a half thousand individuals have shared this
space with us, all moved by the atmosphere of compassion and love. Long may
we continue to offer such a vital service.
TRIBUTES TO 25 YEARS OF TCF
From Linda Abelheim:
I was with TCF for 10 years, 1983 to 1993; so it's been 15 years since I was actively involved. But occasionally TCF beckons and I would have loved to have been here today- I'm sorry I'm not, but I'll be at the airport welcoming my daughter, son-in-law and grandson, who have come from Atlanta for my son's wedding….. You understand. Life prevails.
I'll call her Violet. She pitched up at our Orange Grove offices one morning, wanting to know what the “jolly people” at the end of the passageway actually did. “What's The Compassionate Friends?” she asked, reading the sign on the door. She listened to the explanation and wandered from the first office through to the second …. “Do you love Jesus?” I heard her ask one of the volunteers, who assured Violet that she did. “And you? Are you a Christian?” she enquired of a staff member. “Yes” and “Yes again” from the next two people she approached. Assuring them that Jesus would fix everything. She moved back into the office where I was working. “And you, lovey? Do you follow Jesus too?” Knowing I was about to burst her bubble, I replied apologetically, “well, actually I'm Jewish.” Violet looked at me, her eyes slowly filling with tears. “Oh my dear,” she said, “How do you people manage without God?” We do our best, I assured her.
But the truth is, that whatever and whoever we managed without, we couldn't have managed without each other. TCF wasn't, isn't, just a constitutional organisation with a fund-raising number, run by committees and subcommittees. When we started out, there was no structure and nowhere else to turn, but to each other. It was the people who got involved then, that gave TCF it's heart and it's warmth. And as it was then, so it is now. And so it will always be. Amen 25 years !
Time is an elastic thing in the grieving process – after Joel died, I would measure it in terms of Before and After. I remember sitting in a doctor's waiting room with the two precious children I had left, and picking up magazine after magazine, looking at the date of issue – thinking, this was BEFORE he was alive when this came out; this one was AFTER he'd been dead 3 weeks or months - whatever. Sometimes, I thought – can it be so long ago?… Or is it a year already? … or was he ever here at all?… Time was utterly meaningless. But it was also a time – in the early 80s – where there was very little support for the idea of an organisation dedicated to the support of bereaved parents. It was deemed „unhealthy' by many of the Medical and Paramedical organisations we approached. It was thought to be indulgent by some of the Welfare Powers that Were. There was “not sufficient need” for TCF to exist on it's own – Hospice was there if anyone wanted help. Or the Church. I don't know if we were pilgrims or pioneers in those days, but whatever it was, we were driven by our belief that what we wanted to do was right and necessary and come what may – we WOULD establish TCF in South Africa in honour of our children and that was that. We were on a mission. I'm never comfortable naming lists of people in case I leave someone out. But there was a core group that stuck it out through thick and thin for year after struggling year. With humility and humour, they kept the faith … and their eyes on the bigger picture. They did what they did at TCF for the same reason I did – for the same reason you do – to commemorate and honour their children's lives. It's at the root of it all, isn't it? You're in a group and people are hurting, desperately looking for comfort and you think of your child and reach out and connect with that person, with those people, and you are the only ones who could have done that. You do it in memory. To my friends and co-founders, and sadly some of those have since passed away – and please, if you remember anyone from that time whose name I have forgotten to mention, just call it out – Glenda Bateman, Miriam Biderman founder of TCF Cape Town, the Bourquins, Buchanans, the Colleys and Cooles the Eberlins, Horners, Levines and Milners, Jenny Kander, Jessie Kay, the Kirbys, the Lambsons, Ricky Pearlman, the Pitts, Joan Rees, the Schewitzes, the Solomons, Wants, Mike Wohlman, the Stirlings, Wainers and Wigoder family, Linda W and the entire Wolfaardt family, and to the countless volunteers who helped once – or for years – who brought us cakes or stuck stamps on envelopes, made us tea or sold a raffle ticket or helped set up a meeting – THANK YOU! So – 25 years later and WOW!
I look at this beautiful house
and garden and think – you've
done what we dreamed of –and thank you for that.
Thank you for tenacity and for
meeting the challenge that is
TCF.
Thank you for your courage on
the private battlefields of your
loss and for using the
experience of your child's
death to comfort and support
others. It's a privilege to be
part of it all.
I've heard it said that the mark
of a good leader is that when
he or she vacates their
position, the organisation they
were dedicated to doesn't
falter or fail, but grows and
thrives with the change in
leadership.
Well if that's the case, I must
have been pretty damn good
then, “cos baby, just look at
you now!”
Thank you for having me
Linda Abelheim
by Sylvaine Strike
The universe has given me
two children, I marvel hourly
at their beauty, and am in
awe as to how I could
possibly deserve such
magical and marvellous
beings. They are the light of
my life, they challenge me,
fulfil me, exhaust and
exhilarate me, humble me,
they are my greatest source
of joy. At times they can
also be my greatest source of
fear and anxiety. I would
like to share with you a poem
I once wrote to my son Noa,
then three years of age, when
he was ill with a very high
fever:
My little man, tonight you have a burning fever,
and you lie quite still, curled in a ball, small as a kitten,
Many nights have seen you burning up like this,
your lovely little limbs, fire to touch.
Rosebud clown mouth, breathing quickly,
you are dreaming, hallucinating through the illness,
as you call out loud, to a frog of Beatrix Potter characters you saw at the theatre,
animals you delighted in at the zoo.
All of it returning to the haze
of fever, to your sparkling and
extraordinary mind.
I look at you, and have no words to verse how much love I have for you.
How utterly lost I am in the miracle you are to me each day.
What will become of me if you were to go?
No longer be in my line of them, of surviving the unthinkable, living in a world without that child. When we lost my beloved sister Lolli, on 17 January 2007, the unthinkable had happened to my parents, to our family. Overnight we had become a shattered nucleus. Our centre no longer held, we were a family who were faced with the unspeakable horror of sudden loss. I was seven and a half months pregnant, when my sister, whom I was profoundly connected to, and who was in many ways rather like a child to me, took her life.
Within a few hours of the loss two things became shockingly apparent: How would we survive this loss, how would we live in a world without my sister, how could anything ever be normal or beautiful again? onyx eyes half open, staring through long lashes. At the blue dragonflies and leaves, printed on your pillow. to do, was protect my parents, save them from the pain, filter their agony, nurture and hold them, basically parent them, make it all okay even though I knew it never would be, no matter what I did. There was no time for a screaming newborn now. When a sibling dies, you lose your parents temporarily, and perhaps forever if it weren't for such an extraordinary organisation as TCF.
For parents who have not lost a child, it is an organisation that they would fear ever having to be a part of … For parents who have lost, who are crippled with grief, drowning in the enormity of their pain, grappling to accept, understand, or simply survive … it is a haven, a place where you are immediately understood. Who else could comprehend vision? If our children are involuntarily able to instigate fear in us, it is the deep seated terror of no longer having bereaved parents if not those who are bereaved? Who else could offer the words “it takes time” without it sounding like a cliché, unless it is uttered by those who have survived, the parents who have lost. For even as my own loss, the loss of my sibling is colossal and devastating, I have not lost my child, how could the child who is alive offer any comfort to parents whose child is dead? If I have parents who are caring, loving and positive today, it is largely due to the love and compassion and strength that TCF has offered them.
Through their loss, they
have found amazing people
who have also lost, people
whom it seems, have always
been part of their lives, but
only entered it through the
mutual and devastating loss of
a child. I have seen them
laugh, really laugh together,
Secondly: How would I cope
with mothering my new baby,
when all I instinctively wanted
something I no longer thought
possible. There is something
profoundly moving about The
Compassionate Friends, that an
organisation made up of
broken mothers and fathers
could be so incredibly strong.
That their loss has somehow
given them the energy andgenerosity of heart to open
their arms to others who have
just lost, and patiently await,
sadly those parents yet to lose,
for that is the way of this
world.
TCF we celebrate your 25th
birthday, we celebrate you.
You have saved and givensolace, hope, purpose and even
joy, to so many. We thank you
for your tireless commitment
to the broken spirits, and your
gentle, nurturing ability to
encourage them to be whole
again, for their own sakes, that
of the child they have lost, and
the child that still lives.
from Strilli Oppenheimer
Linda Abelheim asked me to
be Patron of TCF in 1984.
She wanted someone with a
public profile and hopefully
financial resources, whose
name could be on the
letterhead.
I agreed to be a point of
influence.
Ten years earlier, when our
son, Benjamin, died it was a
lonely time. Society was not
sure how to respond to
terminal illness or death.
When support was needed one
found oneself very isolated.
If that attitude to what is
actually a part of life could
change I was happy to offer
my help.
Twenty five years on and
many thousands of people
later, having found strength to
face each day, and often a new
purpose in life itself.
I congratulate you all, and may
your light shine continually.
With warm regards
Strilli Oppenheimer
My dear Compassionate Friends, a quarter of a century of TCF's living service to those who come for help at a heart-broken time in their lives, is a milestone indeed, and I am so moved by the incredible love and commitment, that I know, has gone into these 25 years. My congratulations to all of you who keep compassion's wheels turning, whatever your particular role may be, and my heartfelt acknowledgement of all you more recently bereaved, who have the courage to come and seek help.
At the same time as I know that both healing and service will mark the Compassionate Friends' next quarter century, I pray there will be a steadily decreasing need for such solace. I salute every one of you, knowing, as in part I do, the sheer bravery it took, or still takes, to rise each morning and start each day. Who better to hold the lantern high for today's grieving ones, than those who have suffered such loss and found the strength to lead the way? I send you my love and cannot say how hugely proud I am to have been a part of your exceptional organisation in its early years.
May your road become smooth and the wind be at your back.
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