New Hope, 'New Normal'

In 2005, there were approximately 3,500 deaths reported to the Long Beach Health Department, says Susan Beeney, founder of New Hope Grief Support. Each death, she adds, impacts at least 13 people.

“When you do the math, that’s over 40,000 people in Long Beach who are walking around all ages, grieving the loss of someone they love and not knowing where to go,” Beeney says. “That’s why we’re here.”

In 1986, Beeney began working as a hospice nurse on the cancer-leukemia ward at the VA Long Beach Healthcare System. While she was prepared to provide support prior to death and during the dying experience, she says she was not prepared for the grief that accompanied the loss.

“I began to question and say, ‘What is this thing called grief?’ she recalls. “What was happening was my own grief and losses were bubbling to the surface, so that I was experiencing those that I did not deal with (in) my past.”

After attending classes and seminars and reading books about grief and loss, Beeney authored “Journey of Hope,” a handbook for grieving adults, that same year. For the next 14 years, she provided grief support groups in her home one evening a week, while working full-time as a nurse. In 1999, Beeney quit her job and New Hope was incorporated as a nonprofit organization.

With support of 11 boardmembers and more than 100 volunteers, New Hope last year held 29 weekly grief groups, in which trained facilitators led support sessions for adults, teens and children. And over the last three years, New Hope has partnered with organizations Nationwide to assist Families of the military.

With the help of volunteer Jo Anne Chung, New Hope expanded its services by creating a Kids Club to provide support to children at schools. In addition, since fall 2003, the organization has hosted therapeutic weekend camps for children ages 5-12 at Boy Scouts of America and Campfire USA sites. While the camp would normally cost roughly $275 per child, funding assistance from the Miller Foundation and other donors have allowed New Hope to make the camp available free of charge.

Each camp treat 15 children to pet therapy, a mobile marine museum, art, music, games and priceless gift of listening. “The camps are small in number, but they are huge in the effect,” Beeney says. “ New Hope is a very passionate organization and we’re passionate about grieving people of all ages.”

The organization currently has a large base of individual donors – 98 percent of whom are people who have never been through the program, Beeney says.

“At first, that was an enigma wrapped up in a mystery for me because you would think people would give back. But you see, we set them free to grieve, and that takes time…They’re just trying to make it through the next moment,” she explains. “But others around them want to help. And through giving of the support, the funding, the personal donation to New Hope, that’s how people can help another person – because there are no words, only actions that say. ‘I care,” ‘I’m sorry you lost your baby,’ ‘I’m sorry you lost your brother.’”

While some may associate death and grief with an older age group, Beeney notes that the average adult in a typical grief group is actually 38 years old.

“The older generation is coming to grips with and facing end-of-life issues. It’s the younger generation that is being hit hard with grief and loss,” say says. “We’re getting a awful lot of calls about suicides. We’re getting calls from young families that are suffering cancer deaths from the husband or the wife. And of course there are always child losses of all kinds.”

New Hope likens the grieving process to a journey and bases its services on the model of grief developed by Dr. J. William Worden who noted four tasks of mourning: accept the reality of death; experience the pain of your grief; adjust to an environment in which the deceased is no longer present; and emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life to a “new Normal.”

“It is work, and that’s why (psychoanalyst Sigmund) Freud called it – grief work,” Beeney says. “But I like the idea of a journey because I can stop, I can start, I will even get lost, but I’ll find my way again with the tools from New Hope of how to stay on my journey in a healing way to a place called ‘new normal.’”