Lawton/Ft. Sill Chapter of The Compassionate Friends & Memorial Garden

08/23/2026

Loss of a child, the. deepest loss and the deepest pain

I remember the drive home from Cheyenne's burial like an unchosen language. It's a language I never wanted to learn. And no one in the entire world could pause to translate for me.

As I drove home, cars passed, ordinary and unbothered, carrying people toward their errands, toward dinner, toward families still fully intact. Someone was singing. Someone was laughing. Someone was deep in conversation. Someone was scolding their little child in the backseat.

All while I sat inside my own devastation, like it was a language only I could hear and speak. I looked out at all of them and thought: how does the world keep going after such a loss? I explicitly remember wanting to just --scream--! (Did you ever experience this?)

And the next morning, because days never ask permission, the sun still rose in the east, indifferent and exact. Birds, who owed me nothing, sang just because they could. People I would never meet started coffee makers and answered calls and lived entire ordinary days inside the same 24 hours that held the longest, heaviest moments of my life. I hated them a little, and I understood them completely. The world was not being cruel. It simply didn't know. It couldn't know. Grief is a language without an ambassador.

I understood, while driving in that car on that very heavy day, that I would carry this forever, not as something to 'heal' from (whatever that means), but as something within which I would (reluctantly) grow, not shrink.

Yes, love and the grief were the same size, and neither would shrink.

And I could see underneath the wreckage, some stubborn, quietly wise part of me understood that a kind of 'meaningful joy' (as I call it) would find its way back, not instead of this sorrow, but alongside it. It would become my friend, a companion, rather than a replacement.

More than three decades later, I still feel this way: If I woke up tomorrow and felt nothing, not a twinge of missing her or wishing she had lived beyond her short life... if I felt nothing at all, I would cease to exist.

I don't know how that young woman of 32 years ago intuitively knew what her path would need to be, but I'm grateful to her for never turning away, and I'm proud of all the work she did to become...

For support:

MISS Foundation
Selah Carefarm
www.JoanneCacciatore.com

08/23/2026

True words

"Shouldn't you be doing better by now?"

If you've heard those words - or thought about them yourself - remember this:
There is no expiration date on grief.

Grief changes over time, but love doesn't disappear simply because time has passed.

A year. Five years. Twenty years.

You still miss them.

You still have difficult days.

You still need to talk about them.

And that's okay. Your grief is your own.

08/22/2026

When a child dies, the entire family is changed - including the siblings.

Siblings may grieve openly or quietly. They may talk about their brother or sister constantly, or rarely mention them at all.

There is no single way to grieve the death of a sibling.

What matters is creating space for their grief and letting them know:
Your grief matters. Your feelings matter. Your sibling matters. And you are not alone.

Connect with other siblings online at tcfsibs.org.

Friends

08/22/2026

When a child dies, people often want to help but may struggle with knowing what to say or do. Sometimes, even the most well-intended words can leave a grieving parent feeling unseen or misunderstood. Based upon her grief experience, as well as supporting grieving mothers, Sharon will explore what it means to truly be a safe place for a grieving parent. Topics addressed in this webinar will include: compassionate listening, meaningful presence, remembering their child, and allowing grief to be expressed without judgment or the pressure to “move on.” Participants will leave better equipped to walk alongside grieving parents with greater compassion, understanding, and care. Register to attend this webinar on Friday, September 25th at 12:00 pm ET, https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jOgQNIsOQfi8P1loHkcyVg.

Presented by Sharon Leonard who is is the founder and president of Grief’s Light Outreach, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting mothers after the loss of a child. Following the death of her daughter, Ciara, Sharon turned her personal journey through grief into a mission of compassion, support, and hope for other grieving mothers. She is the author of "Ciara’s Light: Facing Tragedy with Forgiveness" and leads Circle of Light, a faith-centered support gathering for bereaved mothers. Through her writing, speaking, and outreach, Sharon encourages grieving families while helping others better understand how to walk alongside them with compassion.

08/18/2026

08/12/2026

Andrea Magder shares in her article, "When Grief Becomes Invisible." To read the full article, visit https://www.compassionatefriends.org/blog/when-grief-becomes-invisible/.

08/09/2026

🚨 According to Research about our Brain :
This is for the parent who has been told, in words or in the unspoken language of other people’s discomfort, that it has been long enough.

That they should be further along. That the level of grief still present is somehow disproportionate to the time that has passed, as if the loss of a child operated on the same timeline as other losses, as if the brain that created that child and knew that child and was built around that child’s continued existence in the world could simply update its model and move forward on a schedule that makes other people more comfortable.

There is no loss the human brain is less equipped to process quickly. And the scanner proves it.

When neuroscientists imaged the brains of parents who had lost children, what they found inside those brains was the specific neural signature of a grief that the brain’s architecture makes uniquely, biologically resistant to resolution on any conventional timeline.

The attachment between a parent and child is encoded at the deepest level of the brain’s social and survival systems, more foundational than almost any other human bond, because for most of human evolutionary history the survival of the parent was directly tied to the survival of the child, and the brain’s threat response system treated the child’s wellbeing as equivalent to its own.

Neuroscientist James Swain at the University of Michigan, whose research into the neuroscience of parental bonding has produced some of the most important findings in social neuroscience, found that the parental brain undergoes measurable structural changes during the early period of bonding with a child, changes that rewire the reward system, the attention system, and the threat detection system around the child’s presence, needs, and wellbeing in ways that are among the most significant structural reorganizations the adult brain ever undergoes.

When the child is lost, the brain does not simply grieve a relationship. It grieves while running on a neural architecture that was fundamentally reorganized around that child’s existence. The reward system that was recalibrated to respond to that child. The attention system that was rewired to monitor that child’s signals.

The threat detection system that was rebuilt to prioritize that child’s safety. All of these must be gradually, painfully, over an extended period that no external timeline can prescribe, rebuilt around an absence that the most fundamental levels of the brain’s architecture were designed to prevent.

Researcher Kathleen Gilbert at Indiana University, who has studied parental grief extensively, found that the loss of a child is one of the grief experiences most likely to produce what researchers call complicated grief not because the parent is doing grief wrong but because the brain doing the grieving was more completely organized around the lost person than in almost any other form of loss.

There is no timeline for this.

There never was.

The brain reorganized itself around that child. And the undoing of that reorganization, however far it proceeds, cannot be hurried by anyone outside the brain doing it.

08/07/2026

Missed one of our past grief webinars? Our recent webinar, "Finding Peace After Loss, " was just added. Visit our website to watch this one and other past recordings: https://www.compassionatefriends.org/webinars/

08/05/2026

Tomorrow, Thursday, Aug6. is our monthly chapter meeting of the Compassionate Friends, a support group after Childloss for parents, grandparents, and siblings. We meet in the Fellowship Hall of the First Church of the Nazarene, 1402 NW Arlington. We start at 6:30 PM. Tomorrow's topic will be a Sharing session; whatever is on your mind, we will discuss and support each other. If you have never attended our meeting, it might be a good meeting to get to know us,, The Facilitator is Jen
Refreshments will be served.
If it is your child's birthday month, please bring pictures and mementos to share at the Birthday table