Carol Abrams believed her experiences and background prepared her for managing grief. The retired E6 staff sergeant U.S. Army veteran lost her 18-year-old brother in 1971 to colon cancer and she worked for 22 years as a grief therapist for the military.
But it wasn’t until two years after her husband’s death in 2011 that she realized she was “stuck in her grief.”
Abrams said joining the First Baptist Church at
The Villages’ GriefShare support group and completing its workbook during the 13-week sessions helped her heal.
GriefShare is a Christian-centered program that has provided over 20,000 churches with the resources to host grief recovery groups for over 25 years.
“I couldn’t get past losing my brother. I was 27 then and I didn’t join this church until I was 67,” Abrams said. “I didn’t know it was so painful for all those years. There were these songs that anytime they came up, I couldn’t get past the hurt and the anger of losing him. That meant I was stuck. I knew the stages of grief because I was a student of ‘On Death and Dying’ by Kübler-Ross.
“When I lost my brother, I decided to get my master’s degree and go to work in that area as a therapist because I felt the anger and the pain of everything that happened around my brothers death,” she said. “When my husband died in 2011, I thought that I had grown past the grief because I’d taken those steps. But I didn’t realize until I went to GriefShare that I was still grieving my brother and had not even begun to grieve my husband.”
The Summerfield resident went from a student of the GriefShare program at First Baptist Church of The Villages to running it by 2013.
“It is biblical base and it helps you walk through every phase of grief that you go through,” Abrams said. “You go from grieving and mourning to joy. We take them through that by letting them know, ‘Your person is gone but that doesn’t mean that you cannot cherish them.’
“I tell them, ‘You come in knowing that your loved one is not coming back in your brain, but your heart hasn’t accepted it,’” she said. “We walk them through the grief so their heart and head are in congruent with each other. You’ll never stop grieving them, but it doesn’t become pain. It becomes your joy that God gave that person to you as a gift. That’s a gift that you can only hold to your heart to treasure their love forever. Death leaves a heartache that only God can heal; love leaves a legacy that no one can steal.”
Understanding how loneliness can overwhelm a person during days that focus on family and love, GriefShare brings people together during the holidays.
Abrams is hosting a two-hour “Loss of a Spouse” seminar Wednesday, followed by the next round of 12-week session that starts on March 11, and two “Surviving the Holidays” sessions on Nov. 11 and Dec. 9.
This past Valentine’s Day, she led the annual Memories of the Heart event at First Baptist, with the goal of helping people feel less alone on the holiday. Abrams said 31 people attended the event that also featured a free lunch.
“We get together for a couple of hours to feed their body and hopefully nurse their heart,” she said. “Our church gives them flowers and candy because they are no longer receiving those from their loved ones. We let them share some of their joyful memories.
“We don’t go in the grieving part, we want to show the people that have recently lost someone to see those who have walked the trail like I have. You still miss them, you will always love them, but you are not stuck. You’re actually moving forward and you carry those people with you, but you’re not stuck with the fact that they are not coming back.”
Mary Ellen Shea relates to Abrams’ experiences.
As a widow who has lost two husbands — one in 1999 from heart disease and another in 2020 from dementia — Shea said the experience led her to do what she does today — Support the widows and widowers going through grief when the grief is so acute and the need someone to listen.
Shea, a certified bereavement professional and grief educator, provided grief counseling for three years through the The Widow Mentor.
“Their grief is so very raw it’s hard to hear other people’s stories because they need someone to validate them and their story,” Shea said. “It doesn’t seem real in the very beginning the body is trying to understand what just happened. That’s why I just let them talk.”
Registration for all GriefShare programs can be done at GriefShare.org.
Staff writer Brea Jones can be reached at 352-753-1119, ext. 5414, or brea.jones@thevillagesmedia.com.
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