Jim Dodds

Four years ago, when my wife Judy died, I joined a grief support group run by Vermont Home Health and Hospice. There were six people at the beginning. One dropped out, another died, but four of us are still keeping in touch by Zoom and email, and last Saturday we decided to have our first physical meeting of the whole group.

We had a lovely lunch outside in a nice little pavilion on a sunny summer day in Vermont. We’re all oldies, two men and two women, who each lost their spouses to illness after long and loving marriages. I saw something on the web recently that said if you can’t understand the pain of people who go on grieving you should be glad you can’t understand. We all move forward, but we don’t move on in the way that people who are intolerant of our continued feelings would like us to.

Our continued contact and the affection and closeness we feel for each other is a keepsake for all of us that I know we’ll continue to cherish even if we finally lose touch. It’s not a tangible thing like a ring or a favorite chair, but we each know that the others really do understand, and that’s a real thing in itself, that hovers in the air every time we meet.

The other thing about the meeting was that getting together in the flesh and talking for an hour or so about what we are all still going through made it fresh for each of us all over again. But that’s okay. In fact, it’s fine. It’s a good thing to care this much and we all share the belief that the blessing of what we had is very much bigger than the pain of what we lost, even though that pain still looms large and spills over into tears from time to time.