Atlanta’s Warrior Moms offer advice on healing
Grief, some say, is a journey.
For a group of 14 moms in North Atlanta, sharing that journey in words is one way of helping others find joy.
Lately, when I’ve talked to friends, family and even strangers, it seems so many of us are experiencing some version of grief, pain or anger. It’s hard to escape those feelings these days, so when I learned about the Warrior Moms, I wondered if their wisdom on grief might be useful to people feeling a range of other challenging emotions.
If anyone can show us how to find joy in moments of great despair, I am confident that parents — and mothers in particular — who have lost a child can offer a good strategy.
Warrior Moms, the bereavement group which began with two women, has grown by word-of-mouth to include more than two dozen moms. All have experienced what many of them call the most unimaginable loss a parent can feel.
Their children died of health-related illnesses, drug or alcohol addiction, gun violence, vehicle accidents and other causes, but some of their methods for coping are similar.
Next month, during a retreat at Briarpatch Farms in Eatonton, the Warrior Moms will gather with a new set of grieving women to share the wisdom and strength they have learned while healing.
In the U.S., a parent loses a child every 10 minutes, according to statistics from Just Enduring, an organization dedicated to helping parents through grief. Half of child loss occurs before age 1, while 28% occurs between the ages of 16-20. Boys are more at risk than girls, particularly as they become teenagers. Black children are more at risk than children of other races.
For many Warrior Moms, the simple act of writing or journaling helped salve their sadness. The stories included in “Grieve Like a Mother, Survive Like a Warrior” describe how their children lived as well as how they were lost and serve as a reminder to keep thinking of good even when we are overwhelmed with bad.
It has been almost a decade since Michele Hurley Davis lost her son Carter to gun violence, and she has learned the value in continuing to speak his name and find things for which she can be grateful.
“Grief is everywhere, and with child loss, people don’t talk about it because it is so painful,” said Davis when we talked by phone. “Our whole goal was to write the book because it was the book we wished we had.”
Carter and a friend, Natalie Henderson, died on Aug. 1, 2016, when a gunman spotted them in a parking lot and approached the car. Davis wrote about the day she got out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to wake her son and discovered he wasn’t home.
From there, everything became a blur of attempts to locate him through calls to friends and family before she tracked his phone to a location in the parking lot of the local Publix. The teenagers, who were both set to begin their senior year of high school that year, were fatally shot.
Months later, the killer was sentenced to life in prison.
Davis, an English teacher at the Lovett School, took the lead in helping other women write their stories. She urged them to find the space between sorrow and joy, devastation and silliness, something she witnessed from her very first meeting with Warrior Moms, where she found laughter and joy nestled alongside sadness and tears.
We generally like to avoid painful conversations. Americans in particular, said Davis, avoid tough topics. She has found that the biggest fear most people have when talking to a parent who has lost a child is that a mention of the child’s name will make their parent sad. Davis said, the opposite is more often true.
“You see someone crying and you don’t want to invade their space and privacy,” she said. But “(w)e have to bear witness to both happiness and the hard things.”
Here are a few other things I learned from the stories of Warrior Moms that I think anyone dealing with challenging emotions might consider.
You can’t pretend your bad feelings aren’t there. You can’t hide from them and act like everything is normal. Start by acknowledging your feelings, Davis said, then try to show up a little bit each day.
It also helps to ask for and accept help. Lean on the people in your circle, but also make sure your circle is comprised of people who don’t bring anger, hatred, meanness or other negative emotions into your life.
Many Warrior Moms learned to funnel their grief into action, creating foundations in memory of the children they have lost. That spirit is best expressed by the daughter of Warrior Mom Beda Roberts. Ana Olivia Roberts died in a car accident in August 2016, and just over a year before her death, she wrote memorable words of wisdom on her blog.
“It’s OK to be sad,” she said, “and, if anything, let it fuel you to become a better sibling, a better friend and a better you.”
Read more on the Real Life blog (www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/) and find Nedra on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and X (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
About the Author
Nedra Rhone is a lifestyle columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where she has been a reporter since 2006. A graduate of Columbia University School of Journalism, she enjoys writing about the people, places and events that define metro Atlanta.
