- November 28, 2024
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A support club for widows and widowers, Palm Coast’s Survivor Group is anything but grief counseling, says Edna Moss, a group founder. It’s about life, not death.
For Edna Moss, learning to live again started with breakfast.
After another depressing grief counseling meeting in 2008, Moss, who had recently lost her husband of 11 years to Parkinson’s, was tired of crying. “It actually made it harder,” she said of the sessions. “In support groups, they talk about (their) loss, and everybody gets to cry. (But) you can do enough crying by yourself at home.”
Outside the session, she asked four of the ladies from inside if they’d like to go out to eat. They agreed, and a tradition was sparked.
Today, the Survivor Group has grown into an alternative support assembly of roughly 35 members, from ages 70 to 91. There are no dues. It isn’t sponsored. It’s a group of widows and four widowers that meets at a different restaurant every third Saturday of the month for lunch. In between lunches, groups plan activities and picnics, invite speakers and go to movies, exchange books and carpool out of town to attend symphonies and shows.
According to Moss, by word of mouth alone the group sees at least one new member a month.
There’s also a list of members’ phone numbers and birthdays that every new recruit is given once joining the group. If someone is having an especially hard day and wants get out of the house, or would simply like to call on another’s birthday, that’s what the list is for, according to Moss.
“It’s definitely not grief counseling,” Moss said. “You may talk about your loss to one or two people, but it’s definitely not part of the program.”
Unique to the support community, the Survivor Group is more about life than death, she suggested. It’s about rediscovering a place in the world in which to fit.
“When you lose a spouse, your whole life changes … You’re by yourself. And there’s a void. And your friends really don’t know what to say. (But in) our group … if you tear up in the middle of something, they understand, because it happens to them, too,” Moss said.
From New York to the Midwest, members are from all different backgrounds. At every lunch, numbers are assigned to place-settings, and members pick a number from a hat when they arrive. What they pick is where they sit, and that helps them meet new people, Moss said.
“Some of us like shopping and arts, and others like (agriculture). Some of us like movies,” she said. “We just have different interests, and if we’re fortunate, we find someone in the group who shares that interest and we do things together.”
The group’s next official meeting is Saturday, April 16, at Sandy’s Seafood and Steak.
“The reason for the existence of the club … is not good,” Moss said. “We’ve all suffered a loss, and it’s very hurtful. You’re never the same again.”
But the group gets her as close as possible to a feeling of normalcy. “For just a little while you could forget,” she said. Everybody deals with pain differently, she continued, but for most survivors, the camaraderie jerks them out of a feeling of standstill, gets them moving again.
“I feel that I have really true friends (now), and after you’ve been widowed, you don’t feel you have anything … There’s kind of a feeling in the group that we don’t feel that we’re strangers, even the first time (members) come … It’s more a feeling of family than anything else,” she said.
“We’re survivors. We can keep going. You have to survive.”
Moss foresees being in the Survivors Group indefinitely.
For more information call Edna Moss, 445-7230, or Shirley Peirano, 447-1787.
Contact Mike Cavaliere at [email protected].
