GriefShare’s On-Demand ‘Remembering Mom’ Consoles For Mother’s Day And Beyond
Many of the 30.8 percent of Americans whose mothers have died, as the U.S. Census Bureau counted in 2021, experienced the loss when they were not ready to process the pain.
For them and others, such milestones as Mother’s Day come with complicated floods of emotions.
That’s a reality GriefShare, a ministry popular among Southern Baptist churches, seeks to address in “Remembering Mom,” a new resource available to the public as a free on-demand video.
“It’s just a free video that really speaks to the grief with biblical comfort and real-life stories and it reminds people of God’s presence,” Sam Hodges, president of GriefShare’s parent ministry Church Initiative, told Baptist Press.
Soon, the resource will be available to churches to launch small groups, Hodges said, with an additional video in the works specifically designed for those who suffered strained or traumatized relationships with their mothers.
In Remembering Mom, meet Ebony, whose mother died of a heart attack during the COVID-19 pandemic as Ebony sought to care for her, making frequent trips between Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky. Her mother died as she was driving to Louisville.
“And I get there and that’s when they tell me she passed from a heart attack,” Ebony said in the video. “It was devastating, absolutely heartbreaking.”
Bee was visiting her son in Hawaii when she received news that her mother had died of a bleeding ulcer.
“I just told her I’m going to see Ryan and then I’ll be back,” Bee said in the video. “And that was the last time I would see her. I was full of shame and regret and guilt.”
Breast cancer took Tom’s mother in three years.
“And because I have no siblings and my dad had already passed away, I now felt totally alone,” Tom said in Remembering Mom. “It was the first time in my life where I used the word orphan and it made me cringe. I hated it.”
The video offers professional insight into grief, shares experiences from others who are grieving and helps individuals understand their emotions, tools that are especially helpful when grieving.
When grieving, people can be tempted to isolate, become bitter and spiritually confused, Hodges told Baptist Press.
“We want to prevent people from winding up in those places,” he said. “We really think that when people hear other people who’ve been through grief and who’ve wrestled with those same challenges but … they still have hope and they’ve learned things about God that are comforting and reassuring, that gives them hope.
“And the other thing it does is it helps them know that they’re not going crazy, that their experience isn’t abnormal.”
GriefShare’s priority is meeting people where they are, Hodges said, to help them recover. And God is included in the recovery as people learn to deal with such issues as unresolved forgiveness, bitterness or anger, which Hodges describes as “ultimate issues.”
“Like any Christian organization, we want people to come to know Christ, but we don’t lead with that in our videos and materials,” he said. “We present that information gently, and we do it at what we think is the right time.
“But we don’t rush that, because we want to be sensitive and we don’t want to manipulate people who are grieving. And so we’re just really careful about how we present that. But we really do want everyone who comes through to have a relationship with Christ at some point in their lives.”
Remembering Mom will be available online, on demand all year.
“What we’re hoping is that, you know, people will get online and as they often do, they’ll search for help with particular issues,” Hodges said. “There are a lot of people out there who are searching for how to deal with grief after the loss of their mother. We’re hopeful that people will see the link to the Remembering Mom video, click through, and again be introduced to an interesting perspective on how to deal with grief following the death of their mother.”
This article has been republished with permission from Baptist Press.
Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.