grief group

My dad passed away suddenly in the summer between my junior and sophomore years of college. For the whole first year I tried to grieve well: I went to counseling, I journaled, I got help, I talked about my dad with people who cared. But after a year you start to feel like you should be better, and despite what everyone tells you, you still feel like you can't bring up your grief like you could in that first year. 

One day in the late fall of my senior year I showed up late to class and my normal seat was taken. I sat in the back next to a girl I was acquainted with but didn't know well. I happened to know that her brother had died years ago when she was just a little girl. Part of the way through class, I wrote on my notebook, "Do you want to start a group for grieving students?" and slid it over to her. Her mouth dropped open when she read it, and she scribbled back that she'd been wanting to ask me the same thing. We brainstormed in that notebook all through class and in January we put up posters all over campus that said "Have you lost a loved one? So have we," with a meeting time and my apartment number. We had no idea if anyone would come or what we would really do, but at 7pm the next Wednesday we opened the apartment door and waited. 

People kept coming in, students I had never met as well as some I'd known but never knew to invite. 

We were all a little awkward of course, at first. I had a book of 3,000 questions to use as an ice-breaker, and the first one we opened to was "What was the worst moment of your life?" I thought This is a disaster. But to my surprise, we all laughed. That was the beginning of a family. 

We'd all lost someone different: moms, dads, siblings, and friends, through accidents, homicides, suicides, cancer, you name it. But we all had so much in common: funerals, shock, anger, questions. 

We've done a lot of crying together - guys and girls, it doesn't matter. But believe it or not we've done a whole lot more laughing together, laughing over things that sound crazy, like how we want to be buried or the stupidest things we heard at funerals. We're just honest, and it feels like home. There’s something so freeing in knowing that we can’t really help each other, so we just be there for each other.

I don't think people would expect college kids to meet up voluntarily and talk about grief. But two years later, people from that group are the ones I text on Father’s Day. I never saw this family coming, but I couldn't be more grateful for it.