Support group seeks to help young widows, widowers 

Kathryn Monaco-Douglas led an online group of about 135 people just a week before Valentine’s Day. Nobody really wanted to be there: They were gathered to talk about grieving. They had all lost loved ones, many unexpectedly and often recently.

After she told the story of her life and loss, someone in the single-session gathering, organized by Pinelawn Memorial Park and Arboretum as part of a series launched after the start of the pandemic, asked the inevitable question: Does the grieving ever end?

“It gets easier,” Monaco-Douglas said, adding, “Grief has no timeline. It’s like love. It doesn’t end. You can’t say, ‘I loved someone. Then I stopped loving them.’ You’ll always love them. That’s the same thing with grief. It’s always there. But we grow around it, so we can cope with it better.

“The more skills we have, the easier it becomes.”

When Monaco-Douglas’ husband of 19 1⁄2 years died in 2000, she was left with three children. She tried different grief and bereavement groups — but couldn’t find the right fit. Some wanted her to wait before joining; in others, she said, there was no support once the sessions ended.

Her experience led her to found Widowed Not Alone, a grief support group, in 2006. In the 23 years since her husband, Larry, died, Monaco-Douglas has gone from shock to providing support to thousands. Her groups host as many as 100 people, ages 14 to 65, per eight-week session. Although the groups are for people who have lost spouses or significant others, there are subgroups for children.

Group grieving

Justin Locke, president of Pinelawn Memorial Park and Arboretum in East Farmingdale, sees groups like Monaco-Douglas’ as crucial.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pinelawn has hosted 25 online grief workshops, including the recent one Monaco-Douglas led, assisting over 1,375.

“You get together and understand that you’re not alone in this process,” said Locke. “There are many people in your community and beyond with the same struggles.”

Claire Sharkey, a licensed social worker at the COPE Foundation, a Roslyn nonprofit grief and healing organization, calls Monaco-Douglas a “vessel for helping others.” She helps people put their lives together after suffering the loss of a loved one, said Sharkey, whose group sometimes supplies speakers for Monaco-Douglas’ sessions.

Participants in Monaco-Douglas’ Widowed Not Alone have also found her groups to be links back to living.

“She was super-understanding,” said Princess Calder, 41, of Huntington. “Having been through it, she gave me some pointers on the early stages of grief.”

Paul Ragusa-Schweitzer, 57, whose husband died in 2020, said Monaco-Douglas and her groups provided community after tragedy. “Your social circle changes drastically,” he said. “You can’t imagine the isolation.”

Monaco-Douglas’ group gave him a place to go, virtually, to live through loss. “You learn through other people how to be resilient, how to find the strength in yourself,” he said.

Monaco-Douglas’ groups allow survivors to join immediately and be put in a group based on their age. Attendance is free, with continuing support after the groups formally end.

Journey into grief

Monaco-Douglas was 42 when she became a widow. At 44, her husband had seemed healthy, but he developed a blood clot and died unexpectedly in their home, she said. They had three children, then ages 18, 14 and 11.

“It was a shock to me and my kids,” Monaco-Douglas said. “The struggles after that were horrendous.”

Health care providers tried to help, but she said she found a “grief gap” in terms of community. “When Larry passed away, my children and I didn’t know how to grieve,” she said. When she tried to join a grief group, she was told to wait three months. “That was devastating,” Monaco-Douglas said. She began painting murals to make a living and going to therapy at night.

After three months passed, Monaco-Douglas joined a grief group at the Suffolk Y JCC, in Commack, relieved that “somebody knew what I was going through.” When the group ended after eight weeks, she found she was on her own again. “I wanted more,” she said. “There was no connection after that. That was another loss for me.”

Monaco-Douglas joined a group through a hospice in Bay Shore with others in their 60s and older, finding as many barriers as bonds. She wanted to start her own group to help others.

“They said, ‘You’re not a social worker or a psychologist. You can’t do groups,’ ” said Monaco-Douglas. “I said, ‘But I lived it.’  ”

She reached out to St. Matthew Roman Catholic Church in Dix Hills, which sent her to workshops to learn how to assist others with bereavement and grief. After that training, she started her first group in April 2006, meeting weekly with four women; by September she had 14. “As the years went on, the groups grew,” Monaco-Douglas said.

In 2004, she married Scott Douglas, whom she met while attending the Y JCC bereavement group. They had been married 11 years when Douglas’ oldest son died.

“I was devastated,” she said. “My second loss brought me back to the first loss. I thought ‘I’m not going to do groups anymore. I can’t do it.’ ”

“I went to a therapist,” she said. “He said, ‘Try to take the focus off yourself.’ ”

So she went on leading and building the groups she had started through Widowed Not Alone.

Being there

Princess Calder was 37 and seven months’ pregnant when her partner, Rodney Hill, 42, died in 2019 from an enlarged heart. Hill’s funeral took place on the day the baby shower was originally scheduled, Calder said.

“I have a wonderful family and friends,” she said. “I realized early on that I needed support outside of my family, going through the shocking loss of the love of my life.”

A social worker at Huntington Hospital told her about Widowed Not Alone, and she began attending meetings at St. Matthew’s in Dix Hills.

Calder said she got both emotional support and practical help — daily and on holidays — from those she met in the group.

“Our first Christmas, they brought gifts for the kids,” Calder said. “Our first Thanksgiving, they supplied food. They checked on me — text messages, phone calls.”

“No judgment on virtual, but I appreciated being able to give hugs and hold hands and look in each other’s faces,” she said.

Monaco-Douglas believes a sense of belonging and shared experience are important in navigating grief. “I had an insight early on that community is important,” she said. “I felt no one should have to go through this grief alone like I did.”

Pandemic needs

COVID-19 brought losses and challenges to those seeking connection, and Widowed Not Alone faced more people in need and an inability to unite in person.

“We never skipped a beat,” Monaco-Douglas said about the group pivoting to virtual meetings. “We took people from other groups.”

Angela Lee-Moll, 54, of St. James, lost her husband, Steve, a 52-year-old lobbyist, in 2020 to pancreatic cancer. She found out about Widowed Not Alone’s online groups through word of mouth.

“It was good to hear that people had similar experiences and fears,” Lee-Moll said about joining a group.

Navigating grief as a parent seemed especially complex to her. “I’m a pretty independent person. I thought, ‘I can handle this,’ ” Lee-Moll said. “When you have kids, you have to be very careful. They will look at how you’re coping.”

In the early days of the pandemic, her daughters, then ages 16 and 18, lost their father, missed prom and had a small, untraditional graduation. “You’re losing your childhood. Now you’re losing a parent,” Lee-Moll said. “You haven’t even had a normal ending of your high school journey.”

Her daughters joined Monaco-Douglas’ subgroups briefly. “The fact that it’s available was amazing,” Lee-Moll said. “They got to talk to other kids.”

Being a newcomer to LI

Paul Ragusa-Schweitzer’s husband, Neil Schweitzer, died of a heart attack in October 2020, when he was 51. Although Ragusa-Schweitzer’s therapist recommended hospital bereavement groups, he wasn’t able to connect with them during COVID’s peak.

“My summer neighbor had lost her brother,” said Ragusa-Schweitzer, 57, of Long Beach. “She recommended Kathryn’s group” — which the neighbor’s sister-in-law had attended.

Ragusa-Schweitzer joined a virtual group, which he said had benefits. “We were able to have people in our group who weren’t that local, including a woman from here who lived in Florida,” he said. “The virtual piece enhanced the group.”

Ragusa-Schweitzer had moved from New Jersey to Dix Hills in 2016, a year before marrying. “I’m a transplant. I have no family here. I have a lot of friends, but not on Long Island,” he said. “There was a loneliness aspect.”

In addition to emotional encouragement, said Ragusa-Schweitzer, grief group participants helped him navigate interacting with his husband’s family, which was very supportive, the funeral and assets.

He found a job through a group member and has made lasting friendships. “They are my closest friends now,” Ragusa-Schweitzer said of group members. “I don’t know how I would have lived through this without them. We support each other every single day.”

Together again

Widowed Not Alone today has 30 volunteer facilitators, with another four being trained. There are up to 13 groups running simultaneously as well as private and public Facebook groups.

“The groups are growing every year,” said Monaco-Douglas, who retired from her mural business a few years ago. “We hope to keep growing and helping more people.”

Supporting people through grief while growing the conversation about the process has become Monaco-Douglas’ mission and a memorial to Larry Monaco. “I feel we live in a grief-ignorant society,” she said. “Grief is as individual as your fingerprint. We all grieve differently.”

After meeting virtually for two years, Widowed Not Alone groups began gathering in-person again in 2022. Virtual groups remain available for those who can’t travel to in-person locations.

Monaco-Douglas’ philosophy continues to be the same: She doesn’t tell people to move on but encourages them to move forward.

It’s advice Ragusa-Schweitzer has taken to heart, saying he finds it meaningful to keep his lost loved one alive in his daily life.

“Every single day I think of something he said, like, ‘Oh, Neil would have done this or said this.’ Mostly now I laugh when I think about him. He was witty, hysterically funny,” Ragusa-Schweitzer said.

“I talk to him all the time. Sometimes I think about him, and I just cry. I wish he could see me now. I think he does see me now.”