Day 684- Helping Parents Heal May Meeting

I’m pretty tired today. Yesterday was the Derby Party, which takes at least a week to prepare for.  Big gatherings are always stressful since I think about not having Shayna here to share the fun with us.  Tywana didn’t even make deviled eggs this year since Shayna wasn’t here to protest.  LOL.

I get up early and get my walk in. The best thing to do when I’m tired is to make sure I get in my exercise and my meditation.  We decide to skip church today and have a late breakfast at First Watch with some neighbors.  I’ll catch the Cavaliers game later and we’ll have an early dinner so we can get over to the HPH meeting.

As always, I’m wondering how many people will show up.  A woman that we met in Mark Pitstick’s session at Victory of Light shows up first. She’s driven all the way from Indiana.  She asks how many people normally attend. We sheepishly tell her sometimes it’s 0, sometimes it’s 1-2.  It’s been as many as 4. Who knows what today will bring?  Then, a woman I have been emailing for a couple of months shows.   She’s been thinking about coming, but it’s been too soon.  Their kids’ transitions were in September and January. This is the first meeting where Tywana and I are the “veterans” coming up on two years.

I give them the introduction to Helping Parents Heal since both are first time attendees.  Then, I tell them our story of Shayna and how we became involved in HPH.  There isn’t time to go through all of the synchronicities with Susanne Wilson, Mark Pitstick, Mark Ireland, Elizabeth, Boisson, etc. In fact, the web is so tangled I forget how I met each of these people, but it became pretty obvious it was more than coincidence. This is something that was meant to be. They both tell their stories of what brought them to this place.  We all sit and ponder the nature of this whole thing. Is it planned? Is it random?  Is it all for a higher purpose? We can all see that “good” things have come from this tragedy.  We are re-focusing our lives. We are cherishing relationships with others here on the planet with us. We talk about the signs we’ve gotten. We’re confident they are still here with us.  But, we all agree that we’d trade all of this good stuff to have our kids back. We miss the physical touch, the sound of their voices, watching them grow and learn.

Then, we share resources. We talked about podcasts, books, how we learned to meditate, authors, etc.  One person mentioned Lorna Byrne, “The Angel Lady”.  This sounds very familiar to me. Then, this morning as I log into Facebook, my memory from exactly one year ago today comes up in my newsfeed. It’s a video of Lorna Byrne that I blogged about one year ago today. I email the woman who brought up her name yesterday. We agree this can’t be just coincidence. I send her a link to the video. It’s one she hasn’t seen before and she says it’s come to her at just the right time when she needed it today.

The marketing professional in me wants to evaluate the success of our HPH group.  We’re not drawing a lot of people. We’re not helping as many as I would like. I’d like to schedule events and/or presenters for our group, but we can’t do that until we have some idea that a significant number of people will show. But, the meeting has helped Ty and me and I believe it’s helped the two women who showed up.  It’s quality that matters, not quantity. So, it’s completely worth it.