Archive for April 2013
National Volunteer Week: Gratitude
All week we have been celebrating our volunteers, our Buddies, in honor of National Volunteer Week. It would be difficult to adequately measure the impact that our Buddies make in the lives of Kate’s Club members and their families. Kate’s Club is truly a volunteer led organization that is dependent on hundreds of volunteers every…
Read MoreThose Who Understand
When Ashley Thomas lost her mother she, like Kate’s Club founder Kate Atwood, she was only 13 years old. Being a young teenager is challenging enough during the best of times but can become incredibly difficult when you are missing one of your parents. Unfortunately, at that time there were no programs available for…
Read MoreFaith
Losing a member of your family is always a trying time in a person’s life. Often times, we have reason to expect that someone we love is soon to pass while other times it seems that they have been taken without explanation, and often too soon. For 16 year old Faith that is exactly the…
Read MoreTragedy Turned to Light
In 2003 Andi Stein wife and mother to two sons, Alec and Adam, lost her husband to bacterial meningitis. Along with taking her husband’s life it also took from her children any sense of growing up as a normal kid. Alec felt out of place in school, knowing that he must be the only…
Read MoreRelating using movies
One of the things my daughter loves about Kate’s Club is interacting with kids she can relate to. She admitted to feeling like no she knew had lost their dad before attending Kate’s Club. Multiple adults shared their stories of losing a parent with her. Even some who lost their parent at her age. I…
Read MoreAtlanta's Inaugural Death Cafe
As usual, I was listening to NPR on the way home. I heard about the Death Cafe concept started in England in late 2011 by Jon Underwood. The purpose of a Death Cafe is to foster a safe, respectful, confidential, casual forum for discussion of death and how our thoughts and questions about death impact the way…
Read MoreA Means to Heal
“Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing.” -Wendell Berry By what means does the human spirit find healing? American author and academic Wendell Berry endeavored to answer this query. Berry’s conception of healing involves a degree of sociability. To Berry, healing is a state or process that…
Read More