The Galveston County Daily News

TEXAS CITY — Texas City residents Diane Mathis and Jim Lloyd have been friends for more than three years, and often Lloyd will swing by the Rust and Dust resale shop where Mathis works just to sit down and chat. He and his wife Janice know Mathis so well that they can almost finish one another’s sentences.

But they wish they had never met.

Mathis and the Lloyds are members of Compassionate Friends of Galveston County, a support group for parents who have lost children. Mathis’ daughter Susan died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1983. The Lloyds’ son Howie committed suicide in 2001. The group reaches out to parents who have lost sons and daughters of any age and under any circumstance.

It is not a circle of friends that anyone is happy to join. It is a group, said Jim Lloyd, for people with no one else to turn to.

“You wish you’d never met, but they’re the only people you can talk to,” Lloyd said. “Unless you’ve been through what we’ve been through, there’s no way you can understand; there’s just no way. We just try to be here for people, so that they don’t have to go through this hideousness alone.”

It was the need to find others who could understand her pain that led Mathis to a local chapter of the Compassionate Friends in Tulsa, Okla., more than 20 years ago. After receiving a card in the mail from the group, Mathis went to a meeting and discovered that the guilty and suicidal thoughts that plagued her were not crazy, but common. After moving to Texas City years later, Mathis saw people struggling with the same turmoil she had suffered through. She applied to Compassionate Friends to charter a local chapter and became the chairwoman of a group that sends out more than 200 newsletters each month.

The group reaches out to grieving parents any way it can. Often, that means pouring over obituaries, searching for surviving parents and sending them cards. Some of the people they contact have no interest in discussing their pain. Others are desperate to speak.

“There’s a real stigma associated with losing a child,” said Janice Lloyd. “You’re supposed to have the funeral, bring food and then get on with life. Well, it isn’t that simple.

“Your friends don’t know how to react, so they avoid the subject; people don’t know they’re being cruel.”

Well-meaning friends and relatives insisting that lost loved-ones are “in a better place” can sometimes be even worse than saying nothing at all, said Jim Lloyd.

“It all sounds good, but it’s B.S.,” he said. “The better place is at home where you can see them. We can’t help everybody, but we can listen to what they say; they’re pouring their guts out to you. The pain won’t ever go away, but it won’t always be bloody raw, either.”

Compassionate Friends is a group based on small victories and survival. Few things can ease the sometimes-physical pain most parents feel even many years after their child’s death. Working and writing poetry helped the Lloyds; spending time with her grandson helped Mathis. Typically, though, only time heals.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all you had to do was come to a self-help group?” said Mathis. “We just do all we can to help people get through it, and we try to remember all of the children.”

“Trying” is often the bereaved’s best hope, said Lloyd.

“If it didn’t get better, we wouldn’t be here,” he said. “It if stayed that bad, you just couldn’t live. With time it becomes bearable. At our meetings, we laugh a lot. But we cry a lot, too.”