Life after the death of a loved one is bittersweet.

It slams up against you in waves of denial, sorrow, anger and exhausting battles with depression.

Then the healing begins.

These are the stories of people who have answered a call to make that journey with others, a ministry of unmitigated compassion.

It is also the story of people who have experienced healing grace.

* * *

Susan Wright has learned to stop being amazed at the transformation in people who have been able to share the loss of a loved one with others struggling with a similar loss.

“There is something about the empathy between people who have lived through the same life experience that touches people,” said Wright, coordinator of the grief support group at St. Anthony Parish in Sacramento.

Wright was a member of the parish’s pastoral council in 2001 when bereavement ministry was identified as a parish need.

She was one of five people from the parish to attend a two-day diocesan workshop on ministry to the bereaved. Following that workshop, the bereavement committee started a parish program and by 2003 the parish offered an eight-week grief support workshop. In January 2004, they formed their own grief support group.

Their vision for the support group, which meets twice a month, was that it be a peer ministry offering prayer, a time for sharing, presentations on grief topics, informal “go-round” discussions, and refreshments.

Members are given the promise of complete confidentiality.

Whether it’s a husband grieving the loss of a wife, or parents dealing with the inconceivable loss of a child, once people in the support group begin to share their stories, Wright said, something remarkable takes place.

“Losing someone you’ll never get back again puts a mark on your heart, something you bring to the group,” she said. “It helps turn some of the difficult parts of grieving into the loving remembrance people need to have.”

One grief support group member is Betty Matranga, who joined the support group more than a year ago after the death of her husband, Peter.

The couple had been devoted to one another ever since they met more than 50 years ago in the shoe store where Peter worked at the time.

“We went dancing together that night and had such fun,” Matranga said. “We were married for 54 years and always kept our sense of humor about things.”

But in 2002 Peter lost his battle with the cancer that had invaded his body.

Matranga remembers sitting on the bed and putting her arms around her husband when he died.

“I felt so blessed to be with him,” she said.

It wasn’t anger that brought Matranga to the grief support group, but the loneliness of life without Peter.

“Having people there to hug you, listen to you and share your thoughts and feelings…is a safe place to be,” she said. “You find out there are other things in life besides you and your problems.”

When St. Anthony parishioner Vince Svilik lost the love of his life, his wife Margaret, who died on Christmas Day 2003, he was angry.

“It took me a while to figure out you can’t live forever in this world,” Svilik said. “I fought the Lord many times.”

There were times when he wondered what he was “doing on this earth” without a wife.

The couple had met when both were in the U.S. Army and Margaret was working as a nurse at Casper Air Force Base in Wyoming.

“My flight came in (to the base) in a crash landing. I went to the hospital and Margaret took care of me,” remembers Svilik, who soon realized she was the woman he wanted to marry. “We melded together pretty well.”

He admits feeling some concern when he walked into his first support group meeting, the only man sitting down to talk with eight women.

But he found walking the same path with others who understood what he was feeling was a real blessing.

He said the group’s support allowed him to be comfortable with this grief and then to heal. “I go home and cry in front of Margaret’s picture and they told me that was my privilege,” he said.

While St. Anthony’s grief support ministry is primarily for parishioners, the group welcomes people from parishes throughout the diocese to attend meetings. The grief ministry program has grown to include members from parishes in Yolo, Solano, El Dorado and Sacramento counties.

Other components of the program include “Help Through the Holidays” workshops in December and parish-sponsored training workshops for people interested in grief ministry.

* * *

Serving as a chaplain at California State Prison, Sacramento has changed Deacon Dennis Merino in ways he never expected.

He knew that even the routine days of counseling criminals — men guilty of murder, rape and other crimes — would have its challenges.

But an incident occurred in 1996 that would literally reshape his life.

An inmate, notified that his mother and sister had been tragically killed in an automobile accident, plunged into severe depression and was contemplating suicide.

Deacon Merino’s response was to create something new inside the prison walls. It began simply enough with a plan to hold a memorial service for the inmate — time to share his grief with “the men in blue” who were now his family.

He also initiated a new approach to the death notification process that would allow chaplains to be present with inmates during death notifications whenever possible.

“When I give a notification to gang bangers and violent inmates who don’t know who I am and they are weeping in my arms to get rid of their grief, I know God put me there,” Deacon Merino said.

He now facilitates a men’s support group that meets weekly to help inmates grieving the death of a loved one.

“In prison the reaction is to shut down feelings because they will be perceived as weakness,” Deacon Merino said.

One member of the men’s support group is Rick Misener, a former biker gang member whose nickname “Crazy Snake” didn’t begin to convey the anger he held inside.

“In here alone is such a permanent thing,” said Misener, who has been incarcerated for 18 years.

He has seen the way the death of a loved one causes inmates “to spiral into violence.”

Misener has also seen the impact of providing a safe place for an inmate to share his feelings, to tell the story of the person he lost that helps healing begin.

“The spirit shows up when compassion is present,” said Misener, “and compassion is always there in that circle of men.”

Another member of the men’s support group is Ken Allen, whose crimes had taken him in and out of prisons, including San Quentin, many times. Allen had watched those he loved die, including his parents and his best friend, and now realizes he was on a path to destroy himself.

“I’ve had a sense all my life I came here to serve some people, but never knew how to get there and went down the wrong road for 45 years,” Allen said. “I couldn’t get my connection to this world or spiritually until I started in the men’s group.”

By remembering his own experiences of grief, Allen has been inspired to assist other inmates who have lost someone they love.

Ellen Robinson-Haynes and her husband, Sam Haynes, are volunteer grief ministers who attend the inmates’ support group meetings. For Robinson-Haynes becoming involved in such care is more than a ministry. She says it is really her life’s work.

Her favorite saying is, “Death is not a medical event. It’s so much bigger than that.”

A graduate of the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, Robinson-Haynes has helped facilitate the Threshold Ministry at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Sacramento, a comprehensive end-of-life program.

Currently she works as a hospice chaplain for Kaiser Hospital at several locations in the greater Sacramento area.

Robinson-Haynes said while she was initially hesitant to take on an additional commitment to grief ministry at the prison, attendance at one support group meeting changed her mind.

“It was abundantly clear I needed to do this work,” she said. “Maybe it would be another way to know how the divine works in our world.”

The unanticipated thing that happened during the months she’s worked in the prison program is that the men’s group had become “a safe space” for her to deal with grief she feels when Kaiser patients she ministers to die.

“Being there is like being in a warm bath,” Robinson-Haynes said. “I believe we humans take turns serving one another.”

From a purely rehabilitative perspective, said Deacon Merino, the prison support group has been successful in lowering the “acting out” incidents among members at the prison from about 14 each year to less than one a year since the program began.

Deacon Merino, who has been present for hundreds of memorial services and comforted countless inmates over the past decade, said that the ministry comes with “a painful grace.”

“A spiritual director told me that my experience here is the ongoing passion of Christ and that is what it is, seven days a week,” he said. “Now the men have empowered themselves and all I do is unlock the chapel.”

* * *

Kay Skoniecnzy’s life fell into broken pieces too painful to touch when her 57-year-old husband Ben died.

A member of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Sacramento, Skoniecnzy at the time was still absorbing the loss of both of her parents.

“Every time you think of the person you lost, it breaks your heart all over again,” she said.

While the St. Francis community surrounded her with kindness and love, she could not find her way out of her sorrow.

“One of the things about grieving is you need to tell your story as many times as you need to tell your story,” Skoniecnzy said. “A key for me was I needed people who had actually experienced the loss.”

So she started her own support group comprised of five women, mainly St. Francis parishioners, who had experienced the loss of a spouse. The group whimsically called themselves the “Beautiful Marvelous Widows,” or BMWs.

Skoniecnzy also started attending weekly Taize prayer services at St. Francis. She found comfort in the prayer centered service with candle lighting, meditation, music, and Scripture readings.

For the first few months she just went and cried until one day she was able to join in the singing.

“Ritual is at times able to express what word can not,” she said. “For me it was beautiful, like a healing balm.”

Then three years ago Skonjecnzy started a bereavement program at St. Francis called “Grief, Gratitude and Grace.”

It is a program of St. Francis’ Threshold Ministry, assisting families in issues related to acute illness, death and dying, grief and conscious aging.

The mission of Grief, Gratitude and Grace, which meets twice a month, is to provide a healing and a spiritual environment for people who are grieving.

Meetings begin with members lighting a candle in memory of the person they lost.

There is prayer and meditation and a time for the “talking stone,” when people say whatever is in their heart while holding the stone.

Skonjecnzy compares grief to being caught in an undertow that “can right come up and grab you” when you’re not expecting it.

Sharing grief with others, she believes, helps move people along to the last step in the journey: appreciation for the life of the loved one who has died.

“Gratitude is an important part of what helps us to heal because we are more at peace,” she said. “You are more connected to the divine.”

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