GAIL WHITE Compassionate Friends lights the way for those lost in grief

On the table in Sonia Young's West Middlesex, Pa., home sits a large picture collage.
A little boy's first-grade school photo ... A picture of a young man playing the drums ... A yearbook photograph of that same young man dancing ...
"Looking at it, it exemplifies Isaac's life," Sonia says. "He was the life of the party."
Isaac is Sonia and Philip Young's son. He is the only child of the couple.
"God, you better do it now," Sonia said she prayed. They had been trying to have children for years.
When their son was born Sept. 9, 1977, there was only one name the couple could call him -- Isaac. Just like the biblical account of Abraham and Sarah, Philip and Sonia waited a long time to have a child. In both cases, Isaac was the light of his parents' life.
"I used to tease him," Sonia says. "I would say, 'I think I'll have another kid.'"
"I'm all you need," Sonia said Isaac would say. And so he was.
For some reason, God chose to test this couple in the same way he tested Abraham and Sarah.
In 2000, Isaac was attending YSU studying business administration. He played the cymbals in the YSU marching band and worked at a country club cleaning the locker room. He went to the doctor that spring for a cold and neck ache that wouldn't go away.
The doctor later told Sonia that when he saw the lump on Isaac's neck, all he could think was, "Oh my God."
The lump was Hodgkin's lymphoma.
"It started deep in his chest," Sonia explains. "The last place it showed up was on his neck."
"There were symptoms, but we didn't know they were symptoms," Sonia says regretfully.
On April 6, 2001, Isaac died. He was 23.
Describing the loss
"I lost my son. I lost my best friend. I lost my brother," Sonia said, describing the void.
The light of her life had been snuffed out.
"I have had many discussions with God," Sonia said. "He must have thought I was an awful tough woman. I'm not that tough."
"There are days when I feel like he had a mission to fill, and he got his marching papers," Sonia reasons. "And other days, it's like going through this horrible nightmare that never stops. You can be unmindful of it in the daytime. But it's there when you go to bed and there when you wake up."
Grief and recovery
With a degree in counseling, Sonia knew all the stages of grief and the steps to recovery. "This wasn't covered in the books," she says.
"I felt like a freak. I was in a depression," Sonia says of the time shortly after Isaac's death. "People would say things to me, and I would want to punch them in the gut."
She was certain no one understood her pain.
Then Sonia found Compassionate Friends.
Compassionate Friends is a national organization created to help those who have lost a child. "Seasoned grievers reach out to the newly bereaved," the group's Web site explains.
"The first time someone comes, they look like they have been hit by a cement truck," Sonia says. "Most often, they don't think there is anything anyone can do."
But the words of compassion and wisdom that are shared among grievers brings healing.
"We grow close in our suffering," Sonia says with gratitude.
Every year, on the second Sunday in December at 7 p.m., groups of Compassionate Friends across the world grow closer in their suffering with a worldwide candle lighting.
"As candles burn down in one time zone, they are lighted in the next, creating a 24-hour wave of light that encircles the globe," the Web site reads. "That their light may always shine."
On Dec. 14 at 2:30 p.m. at Corner House Christian Church in Hubbard a chapter of Compassionate Friends will meet.
While candles are distributed, photographs of the children whose memory the day honors will be projected onto a large screen.
That's why Sonia has the collage that Isaac's friends made for his funeral on her table.
She just can't decide which picture. Isaac the little boy? Isaac the drummer? Isaac the life of the party?
His light shines in all of them.
gwhite@vindy.com