Photoessay #2417 - Difficult announcement

Last night I used the half hour 'large group' program at parent group to announce the death of the 16 year old son of one of our members.  With the mom's explicit permission.  Our group members, parents of teenage and young adult acting out children are very aware of their children's risky behavior.  It's never happened to a child of an active member in the fourteen years plus that I've been involved.  But never far from these parents' mind.

I knew that we, as a group, had to acknowledge what happened.  And try to put it in some kind of short-term perspective.  I wanted to do it head on...and to let the members know how they could support the family.  Not all the people in leadership positions agreed with me.  There were lots of ideas and concerns.  The leadership of the group remains the responsibility of the 'reps'.  I am no longer a 'rep'.  So I asked them to decide what we should do.

I ended up doing a program about the death.  When you work our program, you pick a small group of your peers, your 'team' and meet separately with the team.  I'm a member of this family's team.  I asked the other team members (5 of us total) to be in front (and comment) with me.  This parent has used her team a lot; we had met within the last two weeks about her son's behavior.

I was very careful what I said.  I did not go into any gory details.  I emphasized that this young man had many mental health and emotional problems of long standing, that he enjoyed very risky behavior and used a large amount of alcohol and drugs.  I invited others to comment being careful not to go over the allotted time.  I passed around a 'meal calendar' and suggested that the members also call and write to the family.  My plan was to gauge the group and decide on the spot whether to do a moment of silence.  I felt that it would work.  So I asked everyone (about 35 in attendance) all seated in a large circle to join hands for a moment of silence.  We did, I sneaked a look and had the strong sense of intentionality and compassion of the members.

Whew!

This is a picture of a memorial in Philadelphia with its own story.  Certainly no memorial has yet been made in this case but it seems to demonstrate how I tried to do the program.