I’ll sit with you

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Tuesday, July 21st.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Sitting with grief. For parents who have lost a child, sorrow can come without warning: it can happen in a grocery aisle, it can be triggered by a familiar smell, or just being in a quiet room.

BROWN: In Savannah, Georgia, one bereaved mother opens her home to others who know that easy answers cannot fix grief—but rather, that it requires someone who’s willing to sit with the grieving and help them bear it.

WORLD’s Jessica Eturralde has the story.

JESSICA ETURRALDE: In Debbie Floyd’s living room in Savannah, a group of women settle into chairs beneath the steady click of a ceiling fan working hard against the Georgia heat.

The women are part of a group called The Compassionate Friends. It’s a peer-support organization for parents, grandparents, and siblings who have lost a child. Floyd leads the group and welcomes bereaved mothers into her home, practicing a ministry she first learned from grief’s other side.

14 years ago, Floyd was a woman who kept everything running. She owned a commercial cleaning business, taught at a Christian school, and read—constantly.

FLOYD: My husband used to get aggravated with me. He would walk in the room and try to say something to me, and I would not hear him if I was reading a book.

In January of 2012, that controlled world stopped.

Floyd had her phone turned off while at a friend's birthday party. When she powered it on, the screen filled with missed calls and messages.

FLOYD: The last person that had tried to call was my son, my oldest son, and I called him, and he’s like, “Where are you, Mom?”

Someone had repeatedly stabbed her other son, nineteen-year-old T.J.

Investigators later said two men ambushed him and his friend during a marijuana deal turned robbery.

He was dead.

FLOYD: Ah, I cannot even describe it. There was a scream that came out of me. It was like nothing I've ever heard before, and it came out of me over, and over, and over again. And for years, I could still hear that scream. It's awful.

The person Floyd had been did not survive that night.

She tried to return to teaching that fall, but couldn't.

FLOYD: I got back in there, and this stuff looked—it might as well have been a different language, and I had been doing that for years.

The women seated in Floyd's living room relate. All of them have struggled to return to the ordinary machinery of life that keeps running whether they are ready or not.

One woman thought she was doing better. It’s been 8 years since her adult son was gunned down. But then, the other day she saw his favorite popsicles at the grocery store. She abandoned her cart and left the store sobbing uncontrollably.

Sergio Wooden, a GriefShare counselor in Savannah, calls this a “grief ambush.”  

WOODEN: It's a phenomenon that happens when, you are emotionally triggered by a smell, or a sound, or a place, or an event that reminds you deeply of your loved one.

These ambushes leave a person feeling the loss as fresh as the day it happened. He encourages his patients to embrace it.

WOODEN: When those moments come, those are genuine feelings, and those are feelings that God gave to you. It's an expression of how deep the love and the relationship was to the person you lost.

What changed for Floyd was not the grief. It was what she learned to do with it.

She learned forgiveness—not easy, she says, for anyone in the homicide community.

FLOYD: My husband died broken completely, completely broken.

He spent the decade after T.J.'s death drinking to numb the pain.

FLOYD: I said "Terry, you have got to reach out to God. You've got to pray." And he said, "Okay." And that's the last time I ever talked to him.

Floyd had also wondered whether God had abandoned her. She lost her mother, stepmother, father-in-law and T.J.–all in the same year. Her grief compounded for years with her husband’s alcoholism and health deterioration. Then Floyd received a breast cancer diagnosis followed by surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. One day in the car, Floyd confronted God.

FLOYD: I can remember being in the car one day and screaming at him and saying, “Why do you hate me? Why do you hate me?” And at the moment I felt like he did, but I can tell you now that he doesn't. He loves me. I've been through a lot—but God helps me use that stuff to help other people.

The grieving women in Floyd’s group share their struggles. They smile tearfully as they recall memories, quirks, inside jokes, and for a moment they almost forget their child is gone.

Then the room falls quiet. Eyes drift to the floor. Faces return to their fixed, fogged expression. Only the click of the ceiling fan echoes in the room.

AUDIO: [Sound of ceiling fan clicking]

Floyd knows that grief is different for everyone. She prays for the women in the group but she steers clear of offering solutions.

FLOYD: I cannot carry you. But I’ll sit with you all day long.

It’s the only thing she knows that works.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jessica Eturralde.

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