HUNT: Widow group offers 'kinship of a shared experience'

Article content

There’s an open house being held at Odell Park Lodge next Saturday for a club that no one wants to join.

They’re not recruiting members, but they want you to know they’re there.

Soaring Spirits Fredericton is the local chapter of an international organization of widowed people – male and female. They get together for dinner at a different local restaurant every couple of weeks to share experiences, offer peer support, and yes, laugh a lot.

“We have people stop by all the time who say: ‘I don’t know what your group is, but I want to join,’” said Stacey Brown, who formed the local chapter of the group after her partner of 17 years, Andre Theriault, died in 2011.

“No you don’t. But you would never guess, if you saw us, that it was a group of widows,” she said.

Brown is a regional director and a member of the board of directors of Soaring Spirits Canada. The organization is international in scope, with a presence in three countries and has more than 90 groups in all. She founded the local chapter a decade ago. Attendance fluctuates between 10 and 20.

“Married, unmarried … if you lost the person who you considered to be your partner, it’s open.”

Brown and Theriault met when she was 18, so they were partners “for my entire adult life at that point,” she said. “I had never lived on my own.”

She discovered the group online and, with the first anniversary of her husband’s death approaching, she signed up for what Soaring Spirits calls “Camp Widow” in Myrtle Beach, S.C., in 2012.

“I thought, well, I’ll go. Worst case scenario, I’ll go sit on the beach for three days.” She got more out of it than a suntan.

“It was walking into a room and being able to connect with other young widows … others who had lost their partner to heart disease … other people who had never lived on their own,” Brown said.

The encouragement you get from other people with that shared experience is so meaningful.

Ellen Gallant

Ellen Gallant and her partner, Rick Lifford, lived together for 14 years. Lifford, well known in the sports community as a softball umpire and hockey coach, and an off-ice official at hockey games, died July 5, 2022. Gallant found him collapsed on the kitchen floor at 6:30 that morning.

“The first three weeks or so, I was just in shock,” she said. “I went to a national tournament here where Rick was supposed to umpire and that was wonderful. After that, I just crashed. And it’s an ongoing crash. It never stops. I’ve always been a very strong person … I don’t feel strong any more.”

She misses “his smile and his kindness,” she said wistfully, and “the routines of the every day,” she said. “Those routines are all gone.’”

But Soaring Spirits helps, she said.

Gallant went to her first gathering seven weeks after his passing, on Aug. 18, at the Garrison Night Market, and has missed only a couple since.

“They mean so much to me that I never want to miss,” she said. “Even though our circumstances are different, our ages are different, there’s an immediate kinship of a shared experience … the encouragement you get from other people with that shared experience is so meaningful. And then, it’s being able to offer that encouragement to other people who are newer in this journey.”

Brown, 47, remarried two years ago. She wears her first wedding ring on her right hand and her second on her left.

The open house next weekend runs from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Odell Park Lodge. The founder of the organization, Michelle Neff Hernandez and an author, will speak via video.