What we’re about
Who are we?
How We Go On is for parents grieving a child who has died from drugs. It is a secular peer-to-peer group providing a safe, non-judgmental place for grieving parents to share their experience and feelings with others who have suffered the same loss and find support and understanding.
Why?
Parents who have lost children suffer a unique type of grief. The death is out of sequence and challenges the very core function of parenting – to protect your child. No matter how old your child was when they died, it is still a parent’s unique grief.
Parents who have lost children to the disease of addiction or drug experimentation face some unique issues that include the separation that addiction (and in some cases, comorbid mental health disorders) creates prior to the death, guilt for not being able to protect their child, the judgement of others who may blame the parent or the child or both for moral failure or poor parenting. Many parents struggle with the decisions they made during the course of the disease. In the case where addiction was not a factor, the questions of how they could have taught their child to be less risk-taking may haunt them.
Our society is not well informed in how to support people in grief and particularly in the case of the death of a child. This is further impacted by the judgement, misunderstanding and mistaken beliefs that many hold relative to street drugs and addiction.
