Press release from the Honoring Grief Circle:
BLACK MOUNTAIN, NC. —“Let’s let grief out of the closet,” says Sheridan Hill, and the Black Mountain memoirist and personal biographer has formed a layperson’s support group to do just that. The Honoring Grief Circle meets the second and fourth Tuesday of each month, from 6 pm to 7 pm, in the library of the Swannanoa Valley Friends Meetinghouse, at 137 Center Avenue in Black Mountain.
Hill stresses that she is not a therapist, and it is not a therapy group but rather a safely-structured one-hour timeframe in which individuals can explore the terrain of grief, and be supported in bearing silent, compassionate witness to their own grief and that of others. All are welcome to attend, Hill says, regardless of how supposedly small, how global, how old, how invisible, or how un-nameable their grief is. She has created guidelines for safety and intimacy, including strict confidentiality, not comparing one type of loss to another, and not trying to “help” anyone else. “The idea is to stop hiding our vulnerability around loss,” she says, “to remove all of the shame surrounding grief and begin to honor the reality that, because we love, we also have loss.”
Not long after moving to Black Mountain in 2004, Hill began volunteering for a local hospice organization, singing and playing the harp for hospice patients for two and a half years. In the 1990s, while working in public relations at a Winston-Salem-based regional medical center, she formed a support group for the families of organ and tissue donors.
Hill has also created A Mourner’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which is one of the handouts in the group. “People I love have been suddenly and tragically taken off the planet since I was a teenager,” she says. “Throughout my life, the issues of mortality and mourning have been prominent and constant. It became clear to me that I needed to develop self-help tools to dig my way out of the maze of emotions surrounding loss and grief.”
Number one on the Mourner’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities is, “You have the right to be sad, and to be angry (including at the Divine), and the responsibility to not hurt yourself or others.” Others include: “You have the right to laugh, to be joyful, to fall in love with life again, and the responsibility to renew your capacity for love.”
Through the upcoming holidays, the Honoring Grief Circle will meet Dec. 22 and Jan 12, 2016. The Honoring Grief Circle is not a Friends-sponsored meeting; a donation of a few dollars each is appreciated, from participants, for use of the space. For more information, Google “honoring grief Black Mountain,” or see http://www.blackmountainvideo.com/honoring-grief-circle.html.
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