A Comfortable Place to Cry

When Lola Ham Minifie, then a Harvard admissions officer, learned several years ago that she had leukemia, she felt she needed a base of support.

She felt Harvard lacked a place for people to go when they needed help dealing with their own terminal illnesses or deaths in their families. So in 1983, Minifie founded Life Raft, a support group for members of the Harvard community.

Minifie's disease was in remission in 1983, but as the group began to take shape, she became ill once again and died in 1985. Elizabeth Bunn, the director of volunteers at the Hospice of Cambridge--another organization that helps terminally ill people--took over Minifie's role as director of the group.

Life Raft meets for two hours every Monday, 52 weeks a year, in the basement of Memorial Church. "Life threatening illnesses do not follow the academic calendar," Bunn explains.

Students, faculty and staff who are affiliated with Harvard can attend the meetings. At any given time, says Bunn, between 30 and 40 people are participating in Life Raft. But there are usually between eight and 12 people at each meeting. Bunn attends all of the meetings, though she says, "it works best when I say the least."

Flexible Attendance

The meetings are informal, Bunn says. "I often don't know someone's last name. One of the important things is that no one has a time commitment. They come for 20 minutes or two hours. They come for a year or for two months or for as long as they want."

The group consists of people with life threatening illnesses, those with ill relatives, and those grieving over deaths in their families. Lutheran Campus Minister H. Frederick Reisz Jr., who refers people to Life Raft, says the group's organizers thought of splitting up those with different problems. But combining the various groups seems to work best. Staff or faculty members with illnesses can answer the questions of students with dying parents, such as "What do you want from your child right now?" or "How would you like me to deal with this?"

One biochemistry graduate student who spoke on the conidition of anonymity says she has been attending Life Raft meetings on and off for more than a year since her father died of leukemia. "My grieving has gone in cycles," she says. "It comes back unexpectedly, and it is good to know Life Raft is always there."

The participants' common ground of suffering brings them closer, she says. "Everyone there has suffered. Everyone is sad and hurting but willing to reach out and help in any way they can. Everyone has gone through the range of emotions--anger, hatred, despair, suicide--all the negative things you feel when you lose someone."

"Sometimes people just come in and cry. They just need a place to cry. You just can't go around the University crying. Sometimes they hug each other," says Reisz.

The members' affiliation with Harvard can also bring them closer, the participant says. "We have this common thing," she says, "of being here where there is a lot of pressure, and we have a lot of work and in addition we are trying to fit in grieving which we did not expect. We all have a lot of things to juggle which is a common denominator."

Although the meetings make up the most prominent part of Life Raft, the organization also includes a "Network" of affiliates. The Network consists of 20 University officials. Most of these participants serve in some advisory capacity, whether as a doctor at University Health Services (UHS), as the dean of freshmen, a Harvard chaplain or as a counsellor at the Bureau of Study Counsel.

Reisz, a Network member, says it consists of "people in various parts of the University who are concerned about working with people in grief and have some sort of training in that area."

The Network members meet three or four times a year, but their primary purpose is to inform grieving students, faculty and staff members of Life Raft's existence and provide supplemental help. A Network member may refer students with religious concerns to the religious authorities of their denominations. If students have medical questions, the Network member may refer them to qualified physicians at UHS.

"I have referred students to someone else because I felt they were more qualified to deal with the student's particular problem," says Reisz. "We [Network members] try to get to know one another and each other's area of competence."

The group has received a great deal of support from President Bok and funding from the University, says Nadja Gould, the group's clinical supervisor and a UHS social worker. There are pamphlets about Life Raft in all of the Network offices as well as at the offices of Harvard's other counseling groups, such as Room 13 and Response. Bunn has written letters to senior tutors to tell them about the program and The Harvard Gazette announces the meetings each week. Reisz says, however, that "you can never publicize enough."

Life Raft's weekly meetings follow no plan, nor do the discussions revolve only around death. "You need a place to go where you can just relax for a couple hours," the grad student says. "It's a place where you can cry or sit or can do whatever you want. We don't all talk about the person we've lost. We talk about our lives now, how our family situations have changed. I did not anticipate how much my family would change after the loss of one member."

The group's participants become "dependent on it but not in a bad way," she says. "They are using it as a way to explore new ways to look at their own lives. It is a real self-help thing; everyone there has to be self-sufficient."

As with many self-help groups, participants who arrive skeptical soon become comfortable as they come to know Life Raft's safe and undemanding atmosphere. The grad student says she has seen people brought to a meeting by a friend who, after being cautions at first, will "absolutely break down and find that the best thing they could possibly do was to let loose." When participants leave the meetings, she continues, "sometimes you feel relieved or sometimes you feel sadder than you did before."

There is a distinction between a self-help group like Life Raft and psychotherapy, Reisz explains. "Discussion comes out of what people have been experiencing that week. They come in wanting to talk. Sometimes they simply want to be there."

Life Raft participants with varied problems have different needs. Reisz, who has been to a few meetings, describes how, when people suffer a death in the family, "they feel that people are avoiding them. It is important to be with other people, but [especially] people who are caring and sensitive."

Gould says that Life Raft can fulfill needs that even those who are close to the bereaved participants cannot. Roommates, for example, might not know how to handle the situation, she says. "People who are bereaved," Gould says, "find that other people tune out. These people need not to be closed off."

Those with terminal illnesses have particular problems and needs that the group can address, Reisz says. For them, "it is important to be reassured again that you are a person with some worth and to be honest about the disease you are suffering with and learn to integrate it into your life," he says.

Reisz says the meetings "provide a cove in the midst of the stream of life where people can pull into and have a restful place to gain perspective with others who are also going through turmoil. It is a place of healing."

Moving On

Bunn says that she can see the beneficial effects of Life Raft on the participants. "Over the past three years I have seen some people get healthy again. They go through these losses and can grow and change." She says she occasionally receives letters from former participants who have "moved on."

The grad student says she is not sure how long she will continue to attend the meetings. Next month is the anniversary of her father's death, and she says she will need Life Raft to help her get through that period. "It is a year later. I should be fixed, maybe I won't go as often now, but I know from my own experience that I can't judge that now."