Bereaved Mother Becomes Peer Grief Specialist
By Luke Schmaltz, VOICES Newsletter Editor
“The way people come into your life when you need them, it’s wonderful and happens in so many ways. It’s like having an angel. Somebody comes along and helps you get right.” – Stevie Ray Vaughan
Late August and early September are trying times for Mary Peckham.
On September 4, 2012, her son Matthew overdosed. Just four days prior on August 31, he celebrated his 27th birthday which also happens to be International Overdose Awareness Day. To top it off, August 30th is National Grief Awareness Day.
For the last 10 years, Peckham has faced this segment of time with trepidation and dread, “I call it my hell week,” she says. Yet, along with the painful memories and glaring reminders, she has fostered a growing sense of strength and direction by helping others who are facing similar circumstances.
“Matt struggled for 18 months,” Peckham begins. “I was the one who found him. There was no help back in 2011. We had suspected he was using again, and I was babysitting my granddaughter who was about to start kindergarten on Wednesday September 5th. I was going to confront him that day as well, but instead, I found him the day before.”
“I floundered in the beginning because I didn’t know where to go or what to do, and after six weeks or so, everybody dropped me,” she says. “So, I reached out on Facebook and I found other moms just like me. We started talking and I decided I was going to go to a grief support group.”
The First Step
Peckham’s first experience with peer support was in a mixed grief group of parents who had lost children to a variety of causes, substance use disorder (SUD) being but one of them. It was here that Peckham first encountered the stigma associated with losing a loved one to SUD as well as the retraumatizing component of having to explain one’s circumstances at the beginning of every meeting.
“Every time we came to this one woman,” Peckham begins, “She would say to us, ‘My son was a good boy, he never did anything wrong,’ and she would scowl at us. Her son died in a car accident, he was an alcoholic, but that’s when I realized that people didn’t associate alcohol with addiction. Judgment and stigma are so rampant. It should not matter how our children died.”
Undaunted, Peckham forged on in her search for support and discovered Team Sharing, where she found her tribe, took on a more active role in the grief support community, and began a gradual transformation. “Honestly, this is something God put on my heart,” she attests. “I used to be a stay at home mom, I had a small sewing business, and I was a tiny little house mouse. I am no longer a house mouse, my husband does not recognize me (laughs), but he is amazed, just amazed, at what I have done.”
Forward Momentum
Soon after, Peckham was able to find joy again and start Matthew’s Candle – a peer grief support group for substance use-related loss “My main goals are to let others know they are not alone, that there is always a hand ready for yours, and that hope, joy, laughter and light will make it through this darkness. To see the bonds that are created within all these groups and how they help each other walk this journey together and heal in small steps is probably my favorite part,” she says.
Next, Peckham met a woman named Susan Willis who started EB’s Hope, which is an East Bridgewater-based coalition of resources and support systems. Here, Peckham discovered drop-in centers facilitated by EB’s Hope and Plymouth County Outreach (PCO), which feature an abundance of resources including Narcan training, harm reduction tools, literature, and more. Eventually, Peckham was asked to host a drop-in center grief resource table.
Through PCO, Peckham became connected to a large support network across the community – a multifaceted collaboration between 28 police departments for providing support and education while reducing overdose deaths. Peckham soon got involved with helping families struggling with substance use. She joined the PCO team as a Grief Support Specialist. Initially, she was assigned to offer support to a household when a nonfatal overdose occurred. Yet, reflecting on her own circumstances, Peckham could not help but think about households wherein an overdose was fatal. “It’s another thing that God put on me,” she states. “I said, ‘We have to do something for these families who have lost someone.’”
Timing is Everything
Based on her experience of loss, Peckham determined that the critical time to offer support for a bereaved family is not right after the death, not at the funeral, nor immediately thereafter. Rather, sometime around six-to-eight weeks after the death, when concerned family members, neighbors, and friends have all gone back to their lives, is when she could be of greatest service. Her first grief visit to a bereaved family as a Plymouth County Grief Support Specialist was in December of 2018.
Peckham describes how her visits to bereaved families are very different from one home to the next. “PCO always sends a sympathy card out and lets them know I will be dropping by to lend them support,” she begins. “They can last anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours, but the average is 30 minutes to one hour. They are always welcoming and so appreciative of the visit and the support that comes with it. Sometimes, they have a question for the specially-trained detective that always accompanies me. These visits can have tears and laughter, and they always have hugs, which are so healing and help to start that flicker of hope.”
Look for the Light
As a bereaved person who has faced some tough stretches of grief, Peckham offers some tried-and-true advice for people who have recently suffered a loss. “When I make my visits to grieving families, some of the things I ask the moms are ‘How are you sleeping? How are you eating?’ because that’s so important.”
For people with restless nights, Peckham describes how having someone to talk to during those lonely hours can be helpful. “Sleeping evaded me,” she begins, “I was never a good sleeper anyway but luckily, I met a woman online who had a daughter who was addicted and is now in long-term recovery. She reached out to me and we would talk from 2:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the morning. You’ve got to find your person. Sometimes it takes a while but I am blessed by quite a few people now.”
Peckham also describes her faith as a hard-won source of strength in the face of grief. “I lost my faith in the beginning, and I am so glad I found it again. I still see moms struggling with their faith and you can’t push that on them. I’ll push self-care on people but not faith. Sometimes it’s hard to find God in the darkness but you’ve just got to keep looking for that little bit of light. There’s always that little bit of light out there and you just have to reach for it. I always talk about being thrown in ‘that pit’ but you just have to keep looking up. There’s a hole at the top and, and with help, we can climb out. There are so many hands up there reaching down for us.”