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BY EDIE GROSS

Jim and Lynne Eppes lost their daughter, Marie, to cancer at the end of July 2006.

About a month later, the Stafford County couple were invited to a grief support group sponsored by Mary Washington Hospice.

Neither thought they needed the help. Jim went anyway. Lynne did not.

"In some ways, I'm a very private person. I wasn't comfortable. I wasn't able to deal with it," said Lynne, who would wait another two years before joining the support group at her husband's urging.

What she found was the freedom to grieve in her own way alongside others who understood the magnitude of her loss.

Nobody squirmed uncomfortably when she talked about Marie, an oncology nurse who was 26 when she died.

No one offered the meaningless platitudes so many others had in the wake of her daughter's death.

No one tried to convince her everything would be OK. They simply listened.

"Nobody tells me what I should think. Nobody fixes anything for me. I have to deal with that myself," said Lynne, who attends the group's Thursday meetings with Jim. "But we respect each other's feelings. The Kleenex is always there."

THE NEED TO HEAL

Joy is easy to share, and even anger generally has a clear target. But grief, one of the rawest human emotions, is often expressed in private.

The temptation to hide it or even ignore it all together is strong, perhaps because it makes us so vulnerable.

But experts say the act of confronting that grief and sharing it with others can heal a person mentally, emotionally and even physically.

"I'm a big fan of groups. It normalizes the grief process for the people there," said Julie Cicero, a licensed clinical social worker in Washington state.

She joined the profession and authored "Waking Up Alone: Grief and Healing" after losing her husband in a snowmobiling accident in 2001.

"Even if you have a great support system around you, people who haven't been there just don't get it," Cicero said. "You generally get two reactions. You get people who run from you because they think it's catchable, whatever you have, and the other ones are the ones who are trying to fix it. That doesn't work either.

"Really, you just need someone to be present with you."

The emotional turmoil grievers feel is perfectly natural, said John James, co-founder of The Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif. But people often remain silent about their grief for fear of being judged by others.

"The shortest scripture in the Christian Bible is 'Jesus wept.' So apparently it was OK 2,000 years ago to be sad when a friend died," James said. "But since then, we've decided it's not OK."

As a result, self-conscious grievers can isolate themselves physically and emotionally, avoiding the very support groups designed to help them. That kind of behavior can have dire consequences.

Research indicates that long-term severe grief can trigger physiological changes that make a person susceptible to auto-immune diseases, cancer, stroke and heart attacks.

With grief support groups available through churches, hospice, social service agencies and even online, suffering alone is simply not necessary, said James.

"Next to breathing, the most common thing that unites people is loss," James said. "Nobody escapes it."

'PEOPLE ARE LISTENING'

For Michelle Stauffer, the bereavement team at Mary Washington Hospice helped fill a void left behind when her father passed away. They checked in on her, asked how she was feeling, took an interest in her life.

"When you've lost a parent, you miss that," said Stauffer, whose father died in January.

Initially, she said, newcomers to grief support groups feel lost and unsure of how to express their emotions.

"The people here, they provide a map for you," she said.

When Janice Cleland's husband, Tom, died of pancreatic cancer in June 2008, she joined a grief support group largely because she didn't want her daughters to worry about her.

"It's been wonderful," the Spotsylvania woman said of the experience connecting with other people who've lost their spouses. "We can almost speak in shorthand. When I say I had a meltdown triggered by something seemingly so insignificant, everybody gets what I'm talking about."

Anne Bagshaw learned to channel her grief through poetry and artwork created in a support group at Mary Washington Hospice.

Bagshaw's husband, Dave, died of kidney cancer in 1999. But she didn't join a support group until her partner, Don Wilder, died of lung cancer in 2008.

"It has really allowed me to open the door in myself and just purge everything, and it has worked," said Bagshaw, a Stafford resident. "We have to purge the sad thoughts so we can move on."

Jim and Lynne Eppes have come a long way over the last year, and every now and then, they consider skipping the grief support group meetings, said Jim.

"You're cruising along for months and then bang, something will hit you out of nowhere, and I'll say, 'I think I'll go back,'" Jim Eppes said. "Everybody's free to talk as much or as little as they want, and if they don't have the words to express it, they can just say, 'pass.' There's no pressure to contribute--but when you start to speak, you have the floor. People are listening."

Edie Gross: 540/374-5428
Email: egross@freelancestar.com

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