‘Everyone in our groups has lost someone to addiction’

Malvernite starts GRASP support group at Our Lady of Lourdes

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After the death of Kerry O’Keefe’s son, Kerry Jr., due to drug addiction in 2006, O’Keefe started going to a Manhattan-based bereavement group to cope with the loss. But it didn’t help. “You’d hear stories of some kids that got hit by a car, others that had cancer, but they were treated differently,” he recalled. “There’s a stigma that comes with a drug death that comes up all the time.”

Some people don’t understand that drug addiction is a disease, O’Keefe said, and others simply don’t know how to react to the drug-related death of a young person.

There’s also a parent’s own, self-inflicted guilt, a belief that he or she did not do enough to prevent that death, combined with grief that is almost too hard to bear, with almost overwhelming, raw emotion.

In 2010, four years after his son’s death, O’Keefe discovered a group called GRASP — Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing — and started going to its meeting in Massapequa. At the time, the group had only a few members. Now, due to the rising number of heroin deaths, attendance at those meeting has increased dramatically, and the numbers keeps climbing.

Seeing the need for more GRASP groups, O’Keefe founded a new one in Malverne, which held its first meeting on Jan. 6. “We basically share what’s going on,” he said. “We’re not there to give anyone advice, because none of us are experts. Everyone in our groups has lost someone to an addiction, so they feel safe talking about their loss. The group dynamics work because there’s a common bond.”

The Malverne meetings will be held on the first Wednesday of every month, in the basement of Our Lady of Lourdes church, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

The organization’s meetings start with a short reading, explaining what GRASP is, why the group exists, and the importance of confidentiality. “We then give people a chance to talk,” O’Keefe said. “I find most people want to — it’s the reason they came.” He said he feels better walking out of the meetings because of the compassion and understanding he gets from the group.

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