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About Needs & Good Deeds

AYTON -- When Teeny McMunn's sister decided to take her own life, she let everyone know why.

The sister suffered from the onset of Huntington's disease, a chronic hereditary condition that destroys a patient's ability to feel, think and move. Their mother at Booker Rest Home had died from it and the young woman didn't want to suffer from the same degenerative demise or be a burden to her family.

So, she wrote everyone a letter and then killed herself with helium.

It didn't seem there was anything intentionally hurtful about her sister's suicide five years ago, but McMunn was devastated, hurled into an abyss of grief from which she only recently emerged.

Because of a dispute around the time of their mother's death, the sisters hadn't talked for a year and a half, leaving a sea of unresolved matters between them and so many thoughts unspoken. For McMunn, longtime Dayton resident and co-owner of Hometown Carpets on Main Street who has suffered the loss of many loved ones and close ones during the past decade, it was one of the most difficult things she had to work through in her life.

But thanks to a grief counseling course she took at Hospice of Walla Walla two years ago, she was able to reconcile her feelings about her loss and other losses. Now, she wants to start a grief support group to help others process their emotions around endof life, end-of-good-health, end-of-marriage mourning and so on.

She's hoping to start her first group in December or January, set for every second and fourth Wednesday at the Dayton Congregational Church. Some of the details are still in the works.

"My brother took his life 30 years ago," McMunn said in an interview. "It took me 14 years to say that without crying."

In a can-do culture that encourages quick-fix solutions to troubleshooting, most people don't deal with grief the way they should or could, McMunn believes. Stoically, you're supposed to get over it with offers of sage words such as "they're in a better place," "it's time to move on with life," or "it's been a year now."

The problem with that approach is that it simply buries emotions that are perfectly natural and need to be experienced so the grieving person can get used to "a new normal," McMunn said.

"In order to heal it, you have to feel it," she said, quoting from Dr. Alan Wolfelt's "Understanding Your Grief," which she will use as a guide for the grief sessions. "A lot of people are going through grief issues, but we live in a society that's not conducive to talking about it. The advantage of doing this in a (support) group is that it is a safe place to talk and cry without someone trying to make it better."

Wolfelt compares grief to a wilderness, "a vast, inhospitable forest."

"To find your way out, you must become acquainted with its terrain and learn to follow the sometimes hardto find trail that leads to healing," the grief educator writes. "In the wilderness of your grief, the touchstones are your trail markers. They are the signs to let you know that you're on the right path."

Those touchstones include being open to the presence of your loss, dispelling misconceptions about grief, embracing the uniqueness of your grief, exploring your feelings of loss, recognizing that you're not crazy, understanding the needs of mourning, nurturing yourself, reaching out for help, seeking reconciliation instead of resolution and appreciating your transformation.

Among the misconceptions about "grief" is its interchangeability with "mourning," but where grief is a simply a jumble of inner thoughts and feelings about loss, mourning is the active "outside" expression of that grief, in other words "grief gone public," Wolfelt writes.

Other misconceptions about grief is that it's predictable, that you should move away from it rather than toward it, that it's a sign of weakness, that mourning openly is a weakness in your faith, that you should try to get over it as soon as possible, that nobody can help you with your grief and that it never come back once reconciled. McMunn herself has already discovered just how powerful the assistance of others can be in reconciling grief. After her own course at Hospice, she co-hosted several grief classes in Walla Walla and she's helped others more informally.

Being a support to grievers is now a calling for Mc- Munn, who plans to start a group in Dayton and has Hospice's approval, though not an official connection. The organization, which unsuccessfully tried to get a counseling program going in Dayton, will refer prospective participants to McMunn, who already has interest from a handful of area residents.

"I want to see how it goes, make it informal and help people work through some of those feelings," she said.

For more information about the grief group, 509- 386-5287.