FAR is Run by You, and You, and You....

Since Friends Along the Road is a free open-source social movement, YOU make it work. If you agree in general terms to the FAR Values and Vision statement, you are free to start your own FAR Sanctuary for Those in Grief In your home, on your land, at your office, job, or church, in the coffee house, in your school, in your gang, in the park, in your car, in the line at the grocery - wherever you can make it safe for people to grieve on their own terms, without pushing your own agenda on them. Download and spread the FAR literature and logo if you'd like. Make decals. Give 'em to taxi drivers and truckers. Talk to people about it. Remember, there are no leaders for FAR, no control-centers, no bureaucracy, no profit-making...just you, and you, and you, being friends along the road of human, animal, and plant people wherever you may meet them. ~ David Pierce, CoFounder, FAR

The Woman in the Waiting Room

While sitting in the relatively empty waiting room of the clinic this morning, waiting to get my legs worked on by the osteopath, a woman of about my age seated close to me struck up a conversation. Naturally, it turned to children, and there was no easy way out of mentioning the death of my daughter, so I told her, briefly. Then she said how she will never get over her own grief and volunteered about how she had been abused by her grandfather from ages 10-15, and how even today, almost 40 years later, it hurts her deeply inside. She started sobbing and I held her for a moment. Then she told me how she felt better now. As I was called in by the nurse, the woman and I shook hands and exchanged first names. Later, sitting in the patient room waiting some more, I realized that while my leg injury was not the cause of "good coming from a bad thing," a way of thinking I do not much care for, that nevertheless, I am pleased how the subtle workings of the universe brought us together this day - the woman in the waiting room and me.

Do I really want closure for my grief?

I despise the term, "closure." Though it flows freely from the lips of TV psychologists, I consider it an ill-conceived and potentially damaging notion. My grief over the death of my daughter is unending, and I am glad for that: it is the closest connection I have with her, it appears to me anew each morning when I wake, and it keeps me on my toes so that I do not become a zombie who is suddenly "over" his grief and instantly focused back upon the trivial things of this world, such as being a good consumer. Grief allows me to think about essential things, to consider life and death carefully, and follow the cues that I am gifted with each moment by the cosmos so that I may live deliberately, with purpose an meaning. "Closure" for me conveys a sense of turning off a faucet. One cannot simply "turn off" grief. We may acquire facts and knowledge of the circumstances regarding the deaths of our loved ones, which may enrich our experiences of grief, but is that "closure"? I do not think so - or think it should be so. Being is infinitely multifaceted and ever changing. For me, I prefer the spigot full-open.