LEWISTON — Kathy Peters knows the hollow expressions and the lifeless stares. They were hers once.

“They’re haggard and they’re drawn,” Peters said. “The fact that you got up that day was a huge accomplishment because who the hell wants to get out of bed? Your child is dead.”

In 1999, a house fire killed Peters’ 23-year-old son and his fiance, 22. Today, her grief remains sharp and painful. But she has learned to live, too. 

Compassionate Friends helped her.

Two years after her son’s death, Peters helped start the nationwide organization’s first Maine chapter in Lewiston and led it for eight years.

Its aim was to create a place for anyone who has lost a child — any age, any circumstances — to share their feelings and ask questions. They meet on the second Wednesday of the month at St. Mary’s d’Youville Pavilion in Lewiston. It remains the only chapter in the state.

“It’s a group that no one wants to belong to,” Drena Sullivan, whose daughter, Jade, died hours after her birth, said.

Understanding is what makes it special, Sullivan said.

“Once I found that group it was like finding home,” she said. “I could talk about my daughter. I could cry.”

“We’re here to tell people that you can survive,” she said. “There are ways of coping.”

Peters sought out the organization after trying several others. She saw a counselor and she attended groups for people who are grieving. But she wanted something closer to her experience.

She struck up an online friendship with someone in New York who had also lost a child in a fire. That person mentioned Compassionate Friends.

Peters checked it out. It was open to anyone who had lost a child for any reason. All religions were welcome. So were all ages.

Peters convinced two other people to sign on and began holding meetings in 2001.

The meetings — usually drawing about 10 people — are run informally.

They are always reaching out, hoping that grieving parents know they exist and need not be scared to come. There’s no judgment. No demands.

“New people look at you and say, ‘Oh, my gosh. How do you survive? How come you’re happy?'” Sullivan said.

What happens at the meetings?

“We talk,” Norma Gross, who began running the chapter with Sullivan when Peters stepped down as the leader, said. “We introduce ourselves, and we tell how we lost our children. We do a brief introduction about the group and why we’re there.”

“If somebody wants to talk, they talk,” she said.

Together, people learn to live with the child’s absence.

“It’s not the same life you had when your child was alive, but it’s life and you go on,” Gross, who lost her son about four years ago, said.

“My son took his life when he was 21,” she said.” He hung himself in the basement.”

Her life since then has been tough. She had to make a conscious decision to go on. The Auburn woman found herself reconnecting with her faith, connecting again to the Catholic church she’d known as a girl.

“I felt that after Dustin died, I needed to connect with God to survive,” she said. “I just feel that if I am closer to God and believe in God that someday I will be with my son again. I just want to make sure he’s with God.”

For some, the reaction is very different.

“Everybody handles it differently,” Peters said. “There’s no norm. There’s no normal way to grieve.”

Peters believes her faith let her down when she needed it the most.

The night of her son’s fire, she prayed.

“That was the most important prayer of my life. When I got there, the windows had all backdrafted and flames were coming out of the roof,” she said. “I did pray and I did pray and I did pray. In the end, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. It took my son and his beautiful fiance. I have to say I haven’t prayed since then.”

For Sullivan, her faith was shaken by the unfairness of her situation.

“I was 25 and pregnant, and I went into preterm labor,” she said. “My daughter lived for three hours.”

Today, she’ll catch herself looking at a child and wonder what might have been. Last Halloween, she saw a mom with boy in a Superman costume. A minute later, she was sitting in her car crying.

“I wondered, Would she be a princess? Would she want Blues Clues? What crazy thing would she have expected me to figure out for her?”

“It’ll rock you,” she said.

She can cry in the group, and she believes the other people there will understand.

Peters said it can be even more basic.

Kind and compassionate people had trouble meeting her eyes after her son died. They didn’t know what to say. They were embarrassed. 

“Here, people look you right in the eyes,” she said.

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