Two widows discovered the hard way that despite the Biblical imperative to look after the “widows and orphans,” most churches don’t know how to provide that help.

Both women now provide the care for others they wished had been provided when their husbands died.

Beth and Alan Fleming had been married 10 short years when Alan died suddenly of complications from septicemia in January 2023. In a matter of a few days, Alan went from complaining of a sore back to lying in an intensive care ward. Exactly a week after taking ill, the doctor told Fleming she should call their relatives to say good-bye. The suddenness of his death was both head and heart spinning.

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The pain of his loss was so intense that Fleming told The Catholic Register she performed “emotional and mental gymnastics” to circumvent it.

“Your whole spiritual framework is thrown upside down. You go to church and people say, ‘Oh, God is so good, and I've received so many blessings from Him,’ and I thought, ‘Well, what did I do then? If I'm not feeling blessed, what does God think of me?’ ”

Fleming says she misunderstood what it meant to grieve as a Christian. Citing a verse from St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, “We do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope,” Fleming says she “thought that meant that we don't mourn, but that’s not reality.”

It was a short text message from a friend of her husband, Christian artist Steve Bell, that pushed Fleming to embark on her “grief journey” and it was the advice of her daughter that directed the path.

Bell told Fleming she couldn’t avoid her grief, “you have to go through it,” and “that's when the lights went on.” She went first to therapy and then, encouraged by her daughter who had suffered a full-term stillbirth in 2017, to Bereaved Families of Ontario (BFO).

Founded in 1977, the organization provides support groups for people at different stages, and experiencing different kinds, of grief. Fleming was introduced to BFO and its offerings at a measured pace.

“It might be too early for you to be in a group where people are talking about sad things. They told me, ‘You have to do some of our other things first.’ ”

Fleming attended a monthly virtual support group before joining a “closed grief group,” comprised of the same 12 people, guided by two facilitators, who met for eight weeks.

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It was a desire for that peer-to-peer support but in a Catholic environment that led Montreal-resident Anne Parsons to start her own group for widows and widowers.

After her husband died in 2015 of cancer, Parsons attended an eight-session series on grief at the palliative care facility where her husband had received care in the last days of his life.

“They had a very nice lady who ran a very good series on grieving, but it was very secular.”

Parsons realized that, though the sessions were helpful to her, “this is not how I handle life. I handle life through faith, and I need to find answers.”

For Parsons, her Christian understanding of marriage meant that the language and categories she used to come to terms with her loss were markedly different from that of secular counseling.

“As Christians, we believe that, in marriage, two become one. To lose your spouse, it's like losing your arm or your leg, it's gone and it's painful. You have changed since you were married. You can't go back to being that person you were before. You have grown together, and you are now this new person molded by having been part of a couple.”

Looking around and not seeing what she felt was needed, Parsons took it upon herself to start a support group that was, metaphorically at least, under the roof of the church. She reached out to Cathie Macaulay, responsible for pastoral home care at the Archdiocese of Montreal, and asked, “Do you think the archdiocese would support this? I don’t want to go off, doing my own thing.”

Macaulay responded positively and helped Parsons connect with the parishes by notifying them of the new initiative. A small group was established and it now meets twice a month, once in person and once virtually. Both formats provide something a little different, but what remains the same is the ability to speak freely about the experience of losing a spouse.

“It's not like I'm telling them how to grieve,” said Parsons. “It is a place to share common feelings. As a widow going out into the world, you must put on your outside face and pretend everything's fine. People don't know how to deal with grief in our modern world. Nowadays it's supposed to be the funeral's over, you're good now, get on with your life.

“Having people at different stages is helpful. The newer grievers will often say, ‘How long is it for you?’ They see you and they think there's hope. We're called to be hopeful people. But when you're going through that, it's very hard to be hopeful. It helps them to see down the road, okay, there's life.”

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Like Parsons, Fleming has decided to offer a hand to those who are just beginning to cope with personal loss. She and her daughter recently took the training offered by BFO so they, in turn, can become facilitators.

“I can take what I've learned in the grief journey and use it to help somebody else. The facilitating thing is a new chapter for me. I didn't want a new chapter, I wanted to grow old with Al, but being with grieving people gives me a sense of purpose. Even though it's in a secular setting, I know that God is using me, if for no other reason than to allow people to feel heard, to allow people to know that they're not alone.”