Butterfly Garden helps ease parents’ sorrow
This gig as a columnist (73 articles in three years so far) has me learning about Peterborough in many different ways. All of them have been relevant to my own living, and almost all have inspired me about the place where we live.
Today, the Bereaved Families of Ontario, Peterborough region. And it’s personal. Many years ago, a child of ours died of a sudden infection in Montreal. We were reeling in pain and shock. We had a two-year-old to comfort. We grieved in different ways and were for a while unable to help each other.
People rallied around us. My parents drove to Montreal from Northern Ontario, calm and accepting, even in their sorrow at the loss of their first grandchild. Our church community must have formed a roster of caregivers because we weren’t alone for one evening for a full month. I took the pills put in front of me and drank the drinks.
Others planned a service that was both child-like and mature. The congregation wore white; the children from the nearby schools were there to both share and give hope. Awkward and caring teenagers came and shook hands.
There was no association to help us but there were poems and readings, insightful books and articles, one especially, The Bereaved Parent by Harriet Schiff, which was a treasure.
So we carried on. The numbness eased. We went on a Marriage Encounter weekend. We had two more children.
Now today, 50 years on, kind and wise people have formed an association for bereaved families, here in our area. It has an office at Murray Street Baptist Church. It applied to the city in 2001 and got an utterly beautiful location at Millennium Park along the river, for its Butterfly Garden.
The BFO is a small, generous collective of basically four persons including Brian Ling, a psychotherapist in his working life, who says, “I cannot do other than this work,” and Richard Jenkins, who grew up near Lindsay and with his wife Linda, tends the garden. He says, “It is simply the right thing to do.”
Gary Beamish from Havelock tends to the paperwork: insurance and annual statements and so on. “I do this work to honour my 15-year-old son who died of leukemia.”
He also serves on the board of the Ontario Bereaved Families Association. This coalition has 12 affiliate members across the province and organizes an annual conference. Peterborough serves a large area: Cobourg, Bancroft, Lindsay and points in between. The budget, from donations, is under $10,000 annually.
The genius, I think, is that each person who counsels is volunteer and has suffered the loss of a child. They are willing to spend time and talent comforting and reassuring newly bereaved family members, by phone or by email or in person.
Bereaved Families serves about 250 families a year here. There is a Christmas gathering, and a Butterfly Release Ceremony, when a new bronze plaque is ready to be installed. Jenkins gets the butterflies from a source in Lakefield. Wendy Rowan coordinates these gatherings. Right now, there are 11 plaques with 19 names each in the garden.
The BFO has noticed that while the need is ongoing, people today are not turning to traditional churches for consolation. There are many young single mothers who are grieving the death of a child but cannot afford a plot in a cemetery or a headstone.
The volunteers know how deeply appreciated is their work, and yet how invisible, even unknown, to many. Of Peterborough’s many good works, I would rate Bereaved Families high on the list. I left our chat uplifted by the ‘kindness of strangers” to one another at the time of an experience that has been described as the worst occurrence one can suffer.