Healing Through Community

This October, I’ve participated in two things I never would have thought I’d do.

I traveled with the Survivor Rowing Club to Boston to row in the Head of the Charles Regatta, and I am co-facilitating a retreat with Hope Edelman, founder of Motherless Daughters.

Wow!  I want to share this with you to tell you I never could have done these things alone.

I found community.

Many of you know losing my mother at the age of 18 had a profound impact on me. In 2012, I started therapy and my therapist told me I had never grieved the death of my mother.  What?  It had been 28 years since she died.  Tell me, I begged her, how does one grieve such a loss?

My therapist provided a safe space to talk about not only my mother’s death, but her life, and how my unexpressed grief was impacting me. In learning about it, I found that I needed to connect with others.  My friend’s nieces had recently lost their mother, and it was then I decided they could not have the same experience I did. So, I started a motherless daughters community.  We met twice a month, reading from Hope Edelman’s book, Motherless Daughters, and sharing our experiences, milestones, roadblocks and grief.  We witnessed one another’s grief.

All of this was put on hold when, in 2016, the year I outlived my mother, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  My focus went to survival. Support through treatment was really helpful - where to buy a wig, how to prevent nausea during chemo, mouthwash you need to prevent sores, and delicious meals prepared for my family…the love we received was amazing!

And then, treatment ended, and so did the community. Once treatment is over, most people think that the hard work is done when, in reality, I was still feeling profound loss. This left me feeling alone and scared.  Depression set in.  What now?  I looked different, having lost all my hair, my body was different, after a lumpectomy, my energy was zapped. Chemo and radiation will do that to you. After such an outpouring of support, which I am grateful for, I found myself struggling with the aftermath of cancer–not only my changed body, but my fears of recurrence. 

Fast forward to 2024 when Karen Blessey, a Breast Friend and doctor, rallied some survivors and proposed we form a rowing club.  The premise was to address what the research was telling us - to exercise 150 minutes per week to lower risk of recurrence.

Gathering with these women and sharing our experiences one by one,  I realized they had the same fears I did.  Although our stories are all different, things we went through to get to this point, the question of “what’s next?” was similar.  In answering this question, a community was built.

If the research says to exercise, let’s give women a way to accomplish that.

Yes, it has provided a platform for exercise, but it has given me so much more.  First of all, a challenge to learn something new.  You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?  Oh yes, you can.

Learning to row shifted my focus from fears of getting cancer again to pushing myself physically and emotionally.  Making new friends who had one thing in common, being supportive to others and giving back. This fellowship and community is a foundation for healing.

Grief is defined as the emotional, physical and psychological response to a profound loss.

Any loss. It does not have to be the result of just death. Many experiences throughout our life create feelings of loss and yearning. This is grief. Sometimes the change is our choice, others, maybe not. Either way, we experience grief. Processing these emotions, having someone witness your grief, especially with someone who gets it, can open our hearts and our heads to new possibilities.

What community are you looking for?

What kind of support do you wish you had?

• Partner loss due to death
• Death of a child
• Survivor of suicide/overdose
• Divorce

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