Red means stop:
And green means go:
The title only has meaning to the members of the BFO (Bereaved Families of Ontario) group I was meeting with for 10 weeks from January to March. Because of the snowstorm in March, Week 10 took place at the beginning of April, and I missed it because I had to be at the airport to fly to Vancouver for Easter weekend. I didn’t want to miss the final week, but that was my only four-day weekend until Christmas and I wanted to be in Vancouver for as long as possible. Another gathering for our BFO group is being planned because we all enjoyed each other’s company, Thursday after Thursday. I was lucky to be a part of such a warm group of people.
I took pictures of this seagull at Nathan Phillips Square with no real purpose in mind, but when I got home and downloaded the files off the memory card this phrase popped into my head — triggered, no doubt, by email from the others.
I would highly recommend BFO to people as a place to turn to when your heart is heavy and its burden is sometimes too great to bear on your own. There are times when that burden is best shared with others who understand, and often that may not include people even close to you — for whatever reason. I found a peer group to be very helpful in areas that individual counselling couldn’t seem to address the same way.
I have to give credit where credit is due: the moderators did a marvellous job of providing an inclusive atmosphere for everyone involved, and in a gentle manner managed to keep the group going despite strong waves of palpable heartache. Sometimes the air was so heavy you could cut it with a knife, but along with all the sadness, every week held a great deal of laughter and joy mixed in, too. Joy and pain can go hand-in-hand, evidently, and as the weeks went by all of us experienced both in varying degrees. Some weeks were tougher than others for personal and circumstantial reasons, and some weeks felt tougher because of the particular subject matter we were discussing. Each person had his or her own tragedy (and tragedies), and we were all in different stages of grieving the loss/es, but as someone mentioned in Week 9, there are more similarities than differences when all is said and done.
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