About Us
Monadnock Compassionate Friends
The Compassionate Friends offers more than 660 meeting locations around the country. In small towns and large cities, bereaved parents, siblings, and grandparents meet together to talk, listen, share, and provide each other emotional support after the devastating death of a child. When you attend chapter sessions, you won’t find professionals running the meetings and giving advice. We are not therapists and we do not provide counseling. Everyone will be just like you, someone who is going through the natural grieving process.
The Monadnock Chapter is a fairly new chapter. After approximately six months of organizational work, our first support group meeting was held in November 2015.
As we meet together, we learn from each other through our shared experiences. You will find people attending the meetings of all ages from young adult to 70 and 80 year-olds. You will find people mourning the loss of an adult child and others who are mourning the loss of a child who never had an opportunity to take its first breath. You may find people whose child died 30 years ago and others with a loss so fresh their pain is measured in days and weeks. Come and join with others who understand much of what you’re feeling—certainly not everything—but a lot more than most people, simply because we’ve been there. Know that there will be sadness and tears as we talk about our loss, but there will also be joy and laughter as we remember special times with our children. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but you will certainly be given that opportunity.
We suggest you attend at least three meetings before you decide if The Compassionate Friends is right for you.
We know that support groups are not for everyone. But why not give it a try and see why it’s not unusual to hear people who attend one day say,
“The Compassionate Friends saved my life.”
Our Mission
The mission of The Compassionate Friends: When a child dies, at any age, the family suffers intense pain and may feel hopeless and isolated. The Compassionate Friends provides highly personal comfort, hope, and support to every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild, and helps others better assist the grieving family.
The Compassionate Friends Credo
We need not walk alone.
We are The Compassionate Friends.
We reach out to each other with love, with understanding, and with hope.
The children we mourn have died at all ages and from many different causes, but our love for them unites us.
Your pain becomes my pain, just as your hope becomes my hope.
We come together from all walks of life, from many different circumstances.
We are a unique family because we represent many races, creeds, and relationships.
We are young, and we are old.
Some of us are far along in our grief, but others still feel a grief so fresh and so intensely painful that they feel helpless and see no hope.
Some of us have found our faith to be a source of strength, while some of us are struggling to find answers.
Some of us are angry, filled with guilt or in deep depression, while others radiate an inner peace.
But whatever pain we bring to this gathering of The Compassionate Friends, it is pain we will share, just as we share with each other our love for the children who have died.
We are all seeking and struggling to build a future for ourselves, but we are committed to building a future together.
We reach out to each other in love to share the pain as well as the joy, share the anger as well as the peace, share the faith as well as the doubts, and help each other to grieve as well as to grow.
We Need Not Walk Alone. We are The Compassionate Friends.
SIBLINGS WALKING TOGETHER
(FORMERLY THE SIBLING CREDO)
We are the surviving siblings of The Compassionate Friends.
We are brought together by the deaths of our brothers and sisters.
Open your hearts to us, but have patience with us.
Sometimes we will need the support of our friends.
At other times we need our families to be there.
Sometimes we must walk alone, taking our memories with us,
continuing to become the individuals we want to be.
We cannot be our dead brother or sister;
however, a special part of them lives on with us.
When our brothers and sisters died, our lives changed.
We are living a life very different from what we envisioned,
and we feel the responsibility to be strong even when we feel weak.
Yet we can go on because we understand better than many others
the value of family and the precious gift of life.
Our goal is not to be the forgotten mourners that we sometimes are, but to walk together to face our tomorrows as surviving siblings of The Compassionate Friends.
Grandparents’ Remembrance
We are the grieving grandparents, the shepherds of our children and grandchildren’s lives. Our grief is two-fold and at times we feel powerless to help. We seek to comfort our children in the depths of their grief and yet we need the time and space to face our own broken hearts. We have been robbed of the special tender touch a grandparent shares with a grandchild and we have lost a symbol of our immortality. As we walk by our child’s side, we both give and draw strength. We reach into their hearts to comfort them, and when they reach out to us in their distress, we begin the journey to heal together. We continue to be their guardians. We allow traditions to change to accommodate their loss. We support the new ones which symbolize the small steps on their journey. It is in their healing that our hearts find comfort.