Good Grief: Series explores loss through eyes of bereaved, from personal stories to a path forward

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Stories are at the heart of the memorial garden at Bo's Place.

The building, with its red brick entryway, tall trees, basketball court, and patio, was intentionally designed on the outside to look almost like two arms, reaching out and welcoming in those who find themselves there as guests, but leave feeling like it's home.

Carmichael Khan is familiar with the garden, which isn't made up of plants in this particular case, but of rocks that serve a very distinct purpose. Resting in the palm of his hand is his daughter's rock, which says, "Just bee."

"That's why you see bees there. You just want to become. You also want to sit with your grief and just be," Khan explains.

Rocks represent, but don't replace late loved ones, and painting them with personality just one of the many ways meant to help grieving children, adults, and families at Bo's Place cope with one of the most difficult parts of life -- death.

"Like many grief centers, Bo's Place was born out of loss," said Marian Mankin, program director at Bo's Place. "Two mothers who had experienced the death of a child were looking for resources for the community, and they kept hearing through the calls over and over again. 'Well, what about my children? Is there anything for my children?' And then they grew from being an information referral line to offering services for families."

Bo's Place helped families like Khan's after his wife, Rose, died in 2006. She was on her way home from work as an airline reservation agent -- a part-time job Khan says spoke to her love of travel and adventure.

"The last memory that we had of our trip was one to Costa Rica, and that's the first time that I rode a horse. I left Texas to go to the beach in Costa Rica to ride a horse, and it was a hair-raising experience," Khan recalled.

Photos from the Khan family's trips. Carmichael said his wife, Rose, loved travel and adventure.

Khan described Rose as a caregiver, devoted mother, and good friend to her friends who became, in a way, patients, "because she was always called upon to help them and would be the person that they would turn to in crisis."

But it was Rose's passion for people -- and community -- that led her to Khan.

"We were community activists together. We worked together at the SHAPE center. We were active in 1991," Khan told ABC13, adding that Rose was involved in a number of movements, including the Coalition to Free Clarence Brandley, a Black man wrongly convicted of murdering a Conroe teen. Brandley was exonerated and freed from Texas' death row in 1990.

Rose, Khan shared, also became a spokesperson for the Ida Delaney/Byron Gillum Justice Committee, formed to tackle police brutality.

"So she was way ahead of her time in terms of activism," Khan said. "That kind of energy and ability to analyze, very astute about what the community needed and how we would divide our time between family business and activism. That continued into our relationship."

Their family grew with daughter Asia, who was just 14 when Rose died.

"We lived in a two-story house, and I would be downstairs, and I would hear crying. Because she would literally be wailing," Khan remembered of the time following Rose's death. "Because the tears of a child.... Oh my, very hard to listen to."

"They used to talk about children as the forgotten grievers," Mankin explained. "People think, 'Oh, they're resilient. They're already playing with their cousins. They're fine.' But children move in and out of their grief. And so you need to be able to revisit and talk about the conversation, about the grief over time."

The National Alliance for Children's Grief calls childhood bereavement a critical issue. One in 12 children in the U.S. will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18, and 14.7 million youth will be bereaved by age 25. Grief can also affect a child's ability to study, focus, and connect with others.

But listening, Mankin says, and giving people the space to talk about their loss, if they want to, can help.

"Being able to say, 'I heard about your father's death. Can you tell me something about him? Is there anything you'd like to share?' It doesn't always have to be talking about the death. People who are grieving love to talk about who the person was, you know, 'What were they like? What did you like to do with your dad? What's a favorite memory that you have?'"

They are questions ABC13's Brittaney Wilmore reflected on after her dad died in 2023. It's why she wanted to hear from others who may have had similar experiences and would be willing to share them so people know they don't have to grieve alone.

"We grieve to the extent that we love. The closer you are to someone, the more challenging your grief experience may be. But also, we grieve based on who we are... our identity, our culture, our traditions, our background," Mankin said.

"I think grief is so personal. It's so different for different people," said Shahine Tavakoli, a licensed professional counselor and therapist. "For me, it was a way of getting to know me more and the pain that was hidden beneath and how important they were in my life."

Tavakoli's sister, Nasrin, died at 35, and their mother Rubab, died at age 63.

"My mom definitely had hugs, laughs. She was the kindest, wisest woman in my mind," Tavakoli recalled. "Seeing my mom going through the pain of losing her daughter so young with three kids... it's also, I think, connected me to my spirituality and the depth of that. We're eventually going to leave this body. What is the purpose of being here in this lifetime?"

Spirituality and faith, Tavakoli said, are two things that helped her move forward in her grief. She practices Sufism, a dimension of Islam.

"In Islam, we talk about we come from God, we go back to God, and there is a belief about life after death," Tavakoli explains.

Shahine Tavakoli says her grief experiences connected her deeper to her spirituality. Here, she shares photos of her late mother and sister.

According to custom, the deceased's body is usually washed and covered with a white cloth before being buried underground in 24 hours. Prayers are recited over the person. Traditions include wearing black for three days for mourning and out of respect for the family. Like in many other traditions, people will bring food or donate flowers as comfort.

For those who aren't grieving but want to support those who are, Tavakoli advises being patient and not judging. Rather, meet people where they are, even if that means allowing them to sit with their grief.

"I think I wanted to let grief become my friend," Khan said. "It's always just under the surface. And I welcome its presence."

WATCH: Good Grief Part 2

Being with a group of people where you don't have to censor yourself or limit your emotions as you grieve can help. Here, Part Two of Good Grief explores how.

Healing through community

A repost on YouTube of anchor Anderson Cooper and late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert's 2019 conversation about grief has millions of views. Search the topic "grief" and you'll find other videos with hundreds of thousands of views, comment after comment. People who are presumably searching for answers and help in something that's not easy or comfortable.

"Grief is something that people don't really like to address. They'd rather kind of not talk about it," said Emily Charles, who runs the weekly grief ministry at The Bridge Church in the Alief area.

Charles' calling is personal. Her son JD died in 2019 at age 35, and after a friend introduced her to a national program called GriefShare, she brought it to The Bridge. The program goes through the different ways grief can affect your life and how to cope, especially when loss leads to roles changing. People who are interested in joining can find a group near them by plugging in their zip code on the GriefShare website.

Perhaps most important, though, the weekly conversations lend themselves to a setting that welcomes real talk in a safe space.

Sometimes, that means busting myths and stereotypes about what grief is supposed to look like, such as the idea that real men don't cry.

"But they do. They need to," said one member of the group, Donna Jones. "I think we have to realize that, to give ourselves permission, to have those feelings and to cry. Grieving has no timetable. It doesn't. And there's no book on it. No one has mastered this class."

Studies on bereavement and group support are limited, but the research that has been done, one health group says, is largely positive. It notes the intensity of grief and stress can decrease with support groups, but that doesn't mean grief goes away, and there's no right way to move through it.

"To me, grieving is something that has its own rhythm, that has nothing to do with your agenda. I've never felt less in control than I was when I was grieving," said Ginger Clarkson, a Buddhist-trained chaplain at Omega House Hospice in Montrose.

Clarkson's mom Virginia died at age 93 in 2019. They were close, sharing a love of writing.

"One of my Zen monk teachers is a grief counselor, and he led a grief group online for 10 people who were in deep grief. And in that group, I just got it that no one is exempt," Clarkson told ABC13. "That's part of the Buddhist's main teachings is everything is impermanent. Everything."

"I feel like that made all the difference," Clarkson describes of going to a support group. "That there was a sense that I am not alone grieving, and that this is a universal phenomena."

Ginger Clarkson and her mother, Virginia, were close sharing a love of writing. Virginia died in 2019.

Clarkson recalled feeling "arid" spiritually. "I didn't feel like my prayers were going anywhere or being heard," she told ABC13. "I have always had a prayer life and always have a meditation. After my mother died, it was dried up."

But she began to feel a gradual shift while continuing the practices she knew of meditation, praying, journaling, and attending a grief group.

"I just knew that state of aridity was temporary also because everything is and that would somehow thaw," she said. "And it did, and I remember laughing."

As a hospice chaplain, Clarkson is going into rooms, "where people have lost everything. They will come here, and they just say, 'I feel like I died and came to heaven. This is the first time someone has spoken to me with respect and compassion,' and Eleanor's spirit is here."

That would be the late Eleanor Munger, a retired teacher who took young men dying of AIDS into her home. Her actions laid the foundation for Omega House, which opened its doors on August 29, 1986. The eight-room building is the first residential hospice in Texas and is still very much a safe haven.

"I came in a coma and the hospital gave me three to five days. That's why I got in here. And one day, the director was sitting and talking to me, and I started coming out of it," said resident Dean Goss. "She saved my life."

Now, Goss told ABC13, he's not afraid of whatever comes next.

"My path? No. I'm going with God. I know where I'm going," Goss said.

It's a belief Charles echoes while also offering that reminder that joy and sorrow can co-exist.

"I know I'll see my son one day again because my hope is to be in heaven. Even though I miss him right now, I live with the hope that I'll see him again. And I want others to feel that same hope," Charles said.

She describes experiencing forgetfulness, not sleeping well, no appetite and crying spells following her loss -- all symptoms that are normal during the grieving process.

"You feel like you've made progress, and then you can get blindsided quite easily, so just allowing people to know that's OK that you have these emotions," Charles said. "These moments become more manageable as time goes on."

And chances are, she says, there are more people hurting than we realize.

"Even if you're mad at God, God's big enough, he can handle it," Charles said. "That doesn't mean he's going to leave you or forsake you, right? And so I think it made my faith stronger actually."

How do we go on?

"Grief and hope are not parallel streets that we have to pick which one we're going to be on, they intersect," Dr. John Onwuchekwa tells a crowd as he's on stage.

It's 2022 in Houston and he's just launched the "We Go On" tour, an event that would go on to be what that intersection of grief and hope is all about.

"That's why I've curated this night," Onwuchekwa continues. "Not to give you an empty, 'It's gonna get better,' but to just help you see that maybe if things don't get better in the way that you hoped that it would, that it's still possible to hold onto hope."

"We Go On" has grown into a variety show of sorts, where no one apologizes for their sadness. And laughter can live there, too.

"The past decade of my life, all of my most important work has been around grief and loss. So in one way, I think I found my true calling as a result of Sam dying," Onwuchekwa tells ABC13.

Sam was Onwuchekwa's older brother, who died in 2015. That's the year Onwuchekwa says his apprenticeship with sorrow began.

"I was in a Longhorn steakhouse when I found out that Sam passed. And 10 years later, I can't make eye contact with the Longhorn Steakhouse logo. It's like those things that are just ingrained. Sam's death inspired me. It's changed me," he explained.

According to the American Psychological Association, there's such a thing as post-traumatic growth, and it looks at five areas: appreciation of life, relationships with others, new possibilities in life, personal strength and spiritual change.

"I sat with my grief for about five years before I decided what I was really going to do with it," Khan, a former computer programmer, said. But after his wife Rose died, he wanted to work with people.

Khan credits his time at Bo's Place for helping him see that.

"Because your heart has been broken, the world also breaks into you, and you can see the suffering," Khan said. "I decided how I would live the rest of my life in a meaningful way, most beneficial way. And I decided to do social work because of the social workers here."

Khan is now working on creating a memorial garden of grief stones at his job dedicated to workers who have died.

Admittedly, arriving at a place of acceptance doesn't happen overnight and grief makes you question a lot.

"I challenged my own faith. It didn't bring me comfort to say that, 'Oh, someday, you're going to meet them in heaven.' That was the worst thing you can say to me," Khan recalled. "When you get challenged with sudden death, what you know is like, 'What? God would allow something like that?' And you had to really question what is your philosophical understanding of belief, divinity, and so on, that the God who allows that also allows life."

As Mankin, who runs Bo's Place explains, people sometimes feel forgotten as time goes on.

"Checking in on those anniversaries or those birthdays or holidays or like when that child would have graduated from high school, all those kind of things just to say, 'Hey, I'm thinking about you. I still care and I still remember.'"

Onwuchekwa came up with a similar tip after Sam died.

"What I started to do was every time somebody had a substantial loss, I asked the name of the person that they lost and I asked them the date that they lost them and I put that as a yearly reminder in phone," he said. "Every year, I text them, and I say, 'Hey, I know it's been a year. I know it's been two years. I know it's been 10 years.'"

Onwuchekwa shared that method with others, who in turn, check on him every April 14, the date Sam died.

"Every year on that date, I think I get more messages than I did on the day my brother actually died, and what gives me hope is every time that I feel by myself, I'm reminded that I'm not alone," he said.

Grief also reminds you, you don't have to wait until you've lost to start living.

"Instead of burying your nose in your phone scrolling, put your phone down, wrap it around your loved one and you nestle your nose in your daughter, and you take in those scents and you live life fully in the here and now," Onwuchekwa said. "It is life's brevity that unlocks its real beauty."

Resources

Bo's Place
Support Tips from Bo's Place Families
Bo's Place Resource Library
The Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center: Grief Support Groups
The Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center: Weekly virtual support groups
Omega House Hospice
GriefShare Grief and Loss Support Groups
We Go On Tour
National Alliance for Children's Grief

Follow Brittaney Wilmore on Twitter and Instagram.