Parents Of Murdered Children-MN Hope Chapter, PO Box 516, Circle Pines, MN 55014 pomc.com rawiggins@comcast.net 651-245-6195 or 651-484-0336

VOICES OF HOPE

Why we are here…

1. To provide ongoing emotional support needed to help parents and other survivors deal with the pain of their loss and facilitate the reconstruction of their lives.

2. To provide contact with similarly bereaved persons and establish self-help groups that meet regularly.

3. To provide information about the grief process and the criminal justice system as they pertain to survivors of a homicide victim.

4. To communicate with professionals about the problems faced by those surviving a homicide victim.

5. To increase society’s awareness of the problems faced by

survivors.

POMC National Headquarters National Organization of POMC, Inc

Executive Director, Nancy Ruhe 100 East Eighth Street, Suite 202

Cincinnati, OH 45202

Phone: 888-818-POMC Fax: 513-345-4489

Email: NatlPOMC@aol.com Online: www.pomc.com

We’d like to hear from you! If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for Voices of

Hope, please let us know.

Contact us either by emailing the newsletter editor at

mbierwerth@hotmail.com

or by mail to our P.O. Box.

Minnesota POMC Meetings Schedule

Minneapolis/St. Paul Hope Chapter 3rd Friday of Month

512 S Albert St., St. Paul

7:00-9:00pm

Holy Spirit Ministry Center located off Randolph Ave and

Albert St across from Holy Spirit Church. Meetings held in the

library located on the 2nd floor. Handicap accessible. Look for

POMC signs. Questions contact Jim Lym @ 651-484-0336 or email at pomc@pomcmn.com

Central Minnesota Meetings

Contact Vicky Bolin @ 612.385.4336 for time and place information.

Southeast Minnesota Meetings 4th Tuesday of Month

18th Ave & 41st St NW, Rochester

7:00-9:00pm

Pax Christi Catholic Church, Rm 5 to the right of the double

door entrance, lower level on west side of church. Questions contact: Connie @ 507-358-4017 or

Lois @ 507-367-4646

More info at www.semnpomc.com

“Membership” is open to those who have been cruelly bereaved by the murder of a loved one. Professionals who are in frequent

contact with grieving families are also welcome to join.

This project was supported by the Office for Victims of Crime, US Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of

the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policy of the US Department of Justice

June 2012

For the families and friends of those who have died by violence

Parents Of Murdered Children, Inc. is a self-help support organization for families and friends who have lost a loved one to violence.

Moving??? Please let us know to keep you on the mailing list

Page 1

Voices Of Hope

Page 2

Name Lived Until

Name Birth Date

Brandon Block June 1, 1994

Andrew E Miner June 1, 1931 Kurt Eric Johnson June 2, 1984

Steven Kangas June 1, 1954

Byron Kendall Phillips June 2, 1996

Christi Marie Mendoza June 2, 1976 Ruth Lyke June 4, 1986

Cally Jo Larson June 3, 1986

Michael Dean Angelo June 9, 1976

Marcus Frank Herman June 3, 1986 Lynn Lea Slabaugh June 9, 1998

Richard Payne June 4, 1953

Bethany Anne Muller June 10, 1990

Daniel Robert Harting June 8, 1966 James Bernik June 10, 1997

Joshua Richard Hoenisch June 8, 1985

Bliss Ursula Verdon June 10, 1997

Anne Barber Dunlap June 12, 1964 Mary Catherine Foley June 12, 1988

Timothy Alan Loeding June 12, 1970

Terry Beeson-Knudsen June 12, 1989

Michael Coins June 12, 1974 Gerald Melford Lee June 13, 1982

Jason Michael Prindle June 12, 1976

Jeanie Ann Childs June 13, 1993

Bonita Bauer June 13, 1946 Ralph Hakes June 13, 2007

Eric Stephen Heim June 13, 1961

Fay Ann Erickson June 14, 1986

Susan M Bauer (Kobilka) June 13, 1964 Patricia Schmidt June 15, 1989

Linda Elizabeth Jensen June 15, 1952

Carin A Streufert June 15, 1991

Debbie Bernhagen Ritacco June 16, 1958 Nelson Ross III June 15, 1994

Sergio Hans Sprandel June 16, 1978

Eric Anthony Woulard June 16, 2007

Terry Beeson-Knudsen June 17, 1958 Eric Douglas Kolstad June 18, 2006

Dennis Thomas Barret June 17, 1964

Holly Jean Paul June 19, 1983

Robin Elizabeth Kitchen June 18, 1960 Kathryn Marion Hebert June 19, 1990

KiAnn Marie Rivas June 18, 1981

Theresa Lynn Robinson June 21, 1994

Arling Albin Brinck June 19, 1941 Vincent Joseph Grazioli June 21, 1994

Michael Paul Kearney June 19, 1980

Melissa Simmons June 23, 1993

Tiffany Ann Johnson June 19, 1981 Ramona Lynn Berger June 24, 1995

Timothy Milton LaValle June 19, 1987

Vincent LaRoque June 25, 2005

Keith Eugene Wallace Jr June 22, 1964 Kari Ann Koskinen June 26, 1994

Scott Herman Scults June 22, 1980

Larry Wayne Bagley June 27, 1987

Loren Busse June 23, 1968 Joshua Kurer June 27, 2011 Steven Edgar Jackson June 23, 1977 Sidney L Roberts III June 29, 1990

Jody Lee Dover June 24, 1968

Emmanuel Da'Chea Killion June 29, 2005

Ruth Lyke June 25, 1926 Carla Harker June 30, 1989

Katherine Gayle Hollifeld June 26, 1949

Marly Renville June 30, 2002

David A Kusa June 26, 1979

Barbara Joan Provost June 28, 1967

Izaak Robert Mcdonald June 28, 1997

Meredith Stepniewski June 29, 1993

Patricia Schmidt June 30, 1961

Carin A Streufert June 30, 1972

“What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose.”

June

Anniversaries Birthdays

*If you do not see your loved one’s name in these

lists and would like to please let us know at

mbierwerth@hotmail.com or send a letter to our

P.O Box.

Page 3 Voices Of Hope

Book Recommendation:

The Year of Magical Thinking

By Joan Dideon

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed

memoir of grief as a long-awaited return to the

terrain of Didion's venerated, increasingly rare

personal essays. The author of Slouching Towards

Bethlehem and 11 other works chronicles the year

following the death of her husband, fellow writer

John Gregory Dunne, from a massive heart attack on

December 30, 2003, while the couple's only

daughter, Quintana, lay unconscious in a nearby

hospital suffering from pneumonia and septic shock.

Dunne and Didion had lived and worked side by side

for nearly 40 years, and Dunne's death propelled

Didion into a state she calls "magical thinking." "We

might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable,

crazy with loss," she writes. "We do not expect to be

literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their

husband is about to return and need his shoes."

Didion's mourning follows a traditional arc—she

describes just how precisely it cleaves to the medical

descriptions of grief—but her elegant rendition of its

stages leads to hard-won insight, particularly into the

aftereffects of marriage. "Marriage is not only time: it

is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty

years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age."

In a sense, all of Didion's fiction, with its themes of loss

and bereavement, served as preparation for the

writing of this memoir, and there is occasionally a

curious hint of repetition, despite the immediacy and

intimacy of the subject matter. Still, this is an

indispensable addition to Didion's body of work and

a lyrical, disciplined entry in the annals of mourning

literature. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier

Inc. All rights reserved

Amazon Price: $10.17

Mike’s Misadventures in Camping

Jim Lym

We have been informed that our murderer,

Jose Amaya who was an illegal from

Honduras when he killed Mike, has been

deported back to Honduras.

It’s been seventeen years since the murder.

Time goes quickly, and slowly.

This got me to reminiscing about the old days

when all our children (we only had three at

that time) and Joanie and I first started

camping as a family. The very first trip we

took was to The Boundary Waters Canoe

Area at a lake known as Flour Lake. On that

particular trip, as novices, our friend Bob

Forliti and I had each borrowed tents,

sleeping bags, coleman stoves, lanterns,

coolers etc.

Between us we owned one sleeping bag per

family. It was the Fourth of July weekend

and we hit four campgrounds before we

finally found Flour Lake with one spot open.

Mike wanted to know why it was open. I

didn’t know…Yet. As we were struggling

with the tents which we were not bright

enough to have tried out at home, Mike came

over and said “Dad…teddy bear”. I told him

to go away as I was hot and frustrated and

not interested. Until I looked to see a mama

bear and two cubs. I knew as soon as Joanie

saw them, we would be taking the half- up

tents down and going home. Instead, she

said “aren’t they cute”. So we stayed. Late

that night the answer to Mike’s question

came. All the garbage cans for the

campground were at the end of our campsite.

Imagine twenty garbage cans and a herd of

hungry bears. They were very impolite

guests.

Contd. Pg 4

Voices Of Hope

Page 4

New Ways to Think About Grief

TIME Magazine, Jan 2011

By Ruth Davis Konigsberg

The five stages of grief are so deeply embedded in our

culture that they've become virtually inescapable. Every

time we experience loss — whether personal or national

— we hear them recited: denial, anger, bargaining,

depression and acceptance. They're invoked to explain

our emotional reaction to everything from the death of a

loved one to the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico after

the BP oil spill to LeBron James' abandoning the Cleveland

Cavaliers for the Miami Heat.

The stages have become axiomatic, divorced from the

time and place of their origin. If you were to read

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying — the book

that in 1969 gave the five stages their debut — for the

first time today, you might be surprised to discover that

Kübler-Ross, then a staff psychiatrist at Billings Hospital in

Chicago, was actually writing about the experience of

facing one's own death, not the death of someone else. It

was other practitioners, having found the stages so

irresistibly prescriptive, who began applying them to grief,

a repurposing that Kübler-Ross encouraged. After all,

there was no specific data set to contradict, no research

protocols to follow: Kübler-Ross had based her theory on

onetime interviews she had conducted with terminally ill

patients, but she never asked them specific questions

about the stages, because by her own account, she only

conceived of them while up late at night after she had

already been commissioned to write On Death and Dying.

The book was a surprise best seller, and Kübler-Ross

became the fulcrum for the nascent death-and-dying

movement. To her credit, she helped shatter the stoic

silence that had surrounded death since World War I, and

her ideas certainly raised the standard of care for dying

people and their families. But she also ushered in a

distinctly secular and psychological approach to death,

one in which the focus shifted from the salvation of the

deceased's soul (or at least its transition to some kind of

afterlife) to the quality of his or her last days.

Cont pg 5

Mike Contd…

Next day a spot up on the hill opened and we

moved all our gear up there. Not the end of

the bears. One came up the hill the next

night and helped himself to our homemade

spaghetti, meatballs, silverware, coolers,

water and dessert. Very sick bear at the

bottom of the hill the next morning. Mike

and the other kids had locked themselves in

the cars to watch the fun while Bob and I

rolled logs down the hill to head her off.

Obviously it didn’t work.

My tent was owned by a good friend from

the office and had never been used. The

bear, who used the side of it for a latrine,

didn’t care about that. My friend David did.

That was the start of many, many wonderful

trips to the wilderness.

I’m remembering another incident at Sawbill

Lake. By that time we had our very own

Sears tent and thought we had arrived. Mike

had a slight defect in one foot that required

corrective shoes. We had just bought a new

pair before the trip. Shortly after we got to

this fabulous campground, Mike came over

to me, obviously distressed. He said, “Mom

is going to be really mad at me.” I asked

why and he led me down the trail to one of

the outhouses. He said I should look down

there. I didn’t see what I was expecting,

but rather one of Mikes Stride Rites, brand

new. I fished it out with a fishline, washed it

off and told Mike to keep mum. He didn’t.

Mom was furious, not at Mike but at me for

getting it back and not telling her. The new

shoes went into the trash barrel.

I could go through many more pages of

experiences of those days but will save them

for another day.

Page 5 Voices Of Hope

MN Hope Chapter Board of Directors

Sharon Huberty-Wiggins (Chapter Leader) 651-245-6195 Jim Lym (Co-Leader) 651-484-0336 Chris Dahl (Co-Leader) 612-789-5947 Darlene Moen (Treasurer) 612-840-8522 Joan Lym (Member) 651-484-0336 Frank Baumgardner (Member) 651-224-3114 Phyllis Baumgardner (Member) 651-224-3114 Mike Schumacher (Member) 612-348-5368

“Justice will only be achieved when those who are not injured by crime feel as

indignant as those who are.”

If you would like support or have information on upcoming hearings, trials, or sentencings please call Jim Lym at 651-484-0336.

Love Gifts A special thanks to all who have generously donated in memory of their loved ones.

Joan and Jim Lym in memory of Mike Lym

Arlene T. Roehl in memory of Arling Brinck’s 71st Birthday

TIME article cont…

It wasn't long before a solution was put forth to help the

bereaved as well, one promoted by an entirely new

professional group specializing in the task of mitigating

grief's impact. From the 1970s to the 1990s, thousands

entered the field, offering individual counseling, setting

up healing centers and hosting support groups at

hospitals, churches and funeral homes. These counselors

introduced their own theories, modifying Kübler-Ross's

stages into a series of phases, tasks or needs that

required active participation as well as outside

professional help. Grief became a "process" or a

"journey" to be completed, as well as an opportunity for

personal growth. Few questioned the necessity of a

large corps of private counselors dedicated to grief,

despite the fact that no country other than the U.S.

seemed to have one.

Our modern, atomized society had been stripped of

religious faith and ritual and no longer provided

adequate support for the bereaved. And so a new belief

system — call it the American Way of Grief — rose up to

help organize the experience. As this system grew more

firmly established, it allowed for less variation in how to

handle the pain of loss. So while conventions for

mourning, such as wearing black armbands or using

black-bordered stationery, have all but disappeared,

they have been replaced by conventions for grief, which

are arguably more restrictive in that they dictate not

what a person wears or does in public but his or her

inner emotional state. Take, for example, the prevailing

notion that you must give voice to your loss or else it will

fester. "Telling your story often and in detail is primal to

the grieving process," Kübler-Ross advised in her final

book, On Grief and Grieving, which was published in

2005, a year after her death. "You must get it out. Grief

must be witnessed to be healed." This mandate borrows

from the psychotherapeutic principle of catharsis, which

gives it an empirical gloss, when in fact there is little

evidence that "telling your story" helps alleviate

suffering.

Cont’d pg 7

Voices Of Hope

Page 6

LOVE GIFTS are a living memorial to our children, siblings and grandchildren, usually given on anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, etc. There is no charge for our newsletters or meetings. We depend solely on your contributions. I wish to make a donation in memory of: _____________________________________________ Amount Enclosed $ __________________ DOB: ____/_____/_____ DOD: _____/_____/____

Age at Death: ______________ Donated by: ____________________________________ Relationship to: _________________________________ Please make your tax deductible check payable to: POMC Minnesota Hope Chapter and mail to: PO Box 516, Circle Pines MN 55014

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it

break. ~William Shakespeare

Directions to Holy Spirit Church

From I-94: Exit Snelling Ave and travel south to

Randolph Ave. Turn left on to Randolph. Holy Spirit is on the south side of the street at

the corner of Randolph and Albert.

From 35E: Exit Randolph Ave and travel west. Holy

Spirit is located on the south side of the street at the corner of Randolph and Albert.

Meetings are the 3rd Friday of every

month 7-9pm

We are sorry for the circumstances that bring you to POMC, but we hope that we can be of assistance to you as you work through your grief. You are cordially invited to attend our meetings each month. Nothing is required of you. There are no dues or fees, and you need not speak a work. Attending your first meeting takes courage, but most find a comforting network of support, friendship, and

understanding that only those who have “been there” can give.

MN Hope Chapter Digital Photo Frame

A very special thanks goes out to the family and loved

ones of Joshua Haglund who generously donated a

digital photo frame to our chapter to help create a very

moving memorial to all our fallen loved ones. It will

be on display at our monthly meetings and any special

functions such as the annual brunch. Below is a

consent form that needs to be completed to have your

loved ones photo included. Please sign and return it to

us by mail or at the next meeting. Include an un-

cropped photo of any size. The clearer the picture, the

better. The photo will be returned.

MN Hope Chapter Memorial Digital Photo Frame

CONSENT FORM (please print clearly)

I give the Minnesota Hope Chapter of POMC permission to use my loved one’s photo for the Memorial Digital Photo Frame that will

be displayed at chapter meetings and events.

Your Name:_________________________ Loved One’s Name: __________________________________ DOB___/___/___ DOD___/___/___ Relationship to Loved One: __________________________________ Address: __________________________________ City:______________State:___Zip:______ Phone(area code):___________________ Email:_____________________________ Donation included (optional):

$_____________

Page 7 Voices Of Hope

But that's not the only grief myth to have been debunked

recently. In the past decade, researchers using more

sophisticated methods of data collection than their

predecessors did have overturned our most popular notions

about this universal experience. Here are some of the biggest

misconceptions about grief:

Myth No. 1: We Grieve in Stages

One of the reasons that the five stages became so popular is

that they make intuitive sense. "Any natural, normal human

being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all

the way through acceptance," Kübler-Ross said in an

interview published in 1981.

Two decades later, a group of researchers at Yale decided to

test whether the stages do, in fact, reflect the experience of

grief. The researchers used newspaper ads and referrals to

recruit 233 recently bereaved people, who were assessed for

"grief indicators" in an initial interview and then in a follow-

up some months later. In the Kübler-Ross model, acceptance,

which she defined as recognizing that your loved one is

permanently gone, is the final stage. But the resulting study,

published in the Journal of the American Medical Association

in 2007, found that most respondents accepted the death of

a loved one from the very beginning. On top of that,

participants reported feeling more yearning for their loved

one than either anger or depression, perhaps the two

cornerstone stages in the Kübler-Ross model.

Skepticism about the stages has been building in academia

for a long time, and yet they still hold sway with practitioners

and the general public. A 2008 survey of hospices in Canada

found that Kübler-Ross's work was the literature most

frequently consulted and distributed to families of dying

patients. "Stage theories of grief have become embedded in

curricula, textbooks, popular entertainment and media

because they offer predictability and a sense of

manageability of the powerful emotions associated with

bereavement and loss," says Janice Genevro, a psychologist

who was commissioned by a Washington nonprofit now

called the Center for Advancing Health to do a report on the

quality of grief services. In her 2003 report, Genevro

concluded that the information being used to help the

bereaved was misaligned with the latest research, which

increasingly indicates that grief is not a series of steps that

ultimately deposit us at a psychological finish line but rather

a grab bag of symptoms that come and go and, eventually,

simply lift.

Myth No. 2: Express It; Don't Repress It

The American way of grief places great importance on the

expression of your darkest emotions. "Anger is a necessary

stage of the healing process ... [It] means you are

progressing," Kübler-Ross wrote. This may sound good, but

it's proving to be inaccurate: expressing negative emotions

can actually prolong your distress. In a 2007 study of 66

people who had recently lost a spouse or child, those who did

not express their negative emotions six months after their

loss were less depressed and anxious and had fewer health

complaints at 14 and 25 months than those who did express

negative emotions. The study, which included a control group

of nonbereaved participants and which was conducted by

George Bonanno, a professor at Columbia University's

Teachers College who specializes in the psychology of loss

and trauma, suggests that tamping down or avoiding those

feelings, known as "repressive coping," actually has a

protective function.

A related myth is the "grief work hypothesis," which defines

grief as a project that must be tackled in order to prevent

psychological problems. This notion can be traced back to

Freud, who wrote that the "work of mourning" was for the

ego to detach itself from the deceased so that it could

reattach itself to someone else. In the 1970s, Freud's

definition of grief as work became the guiding metaphor for

modern grief theory. But a 60-person study conducted by the

husband-and-wife research team Wolfgang and Margaret

Stroebe of Utrecht University found that widows who

avoided confronting their loss were not any more depressed

than widows who "worked through" their grief. As to the

importance of giving grief a voice, several other studies done

by the Stroebes indicated that talking or writing about the

death of a spouse did not help people adjust to that loss any

better.

This seems to hold true for other traumatic events, like the

terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In a study published in the

Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 2008, more

than 2,000 people were given the chance to express their

reactions in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and were then

followed for the next two years. Contrary to popular belief,

people who did not express their initial reactions showed

fewer signs of distress later on, while people who did express

their reactions had a harder time adjusting.

The rest of this article can be found at : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,

2042372-2,00.html

Voices Of Hope

Page 8

MN Hope Chapter

Upcoming Events

Meeting: July 20th

We’re on the Web!

Visit us at:

Pomc.com/minnesota

Newsletter Mailing List Update This is an effort to update our mailing list. We are asking for your cooperation.

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IF WE DO NOT HEAR FROM YOU, YOU WILL BE REMOVED FROM OUR MAILING LIST. We hope you will continue to want to receive the newsletter

and future mailings. Thank you, MN Hope Chapter Board of Directors. Name:____________________________________ Newsletter Donation: $____________ (optional) Address:_____________________________City:_____________St:_____Zip:__________ Home Phone: (____)_____________ Work Phone: (____)____________ Permission to send info to POMC National: Yes:______ No:______ Email Address:______________________________________________________________ Do you wish to remain on the mailing list? Yes____ No____ If yes, by Mail____Email___ Survivor/ Professional/ Both If Professional, Company Name:_____________________ (circle one) Victim’s Name:_____________________________________________________________ Last First Middle

DOB:____/____/____ DOD:____/____/____ Age at time of death:____

Your relationship to the Victim:_______________________________________________________

Mail to: POMC, inc. MN Hope Chapter, PO Box 516, Circle Pines, MN 55104

Or email us at: pomc@pomcmn.com

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Parents Of Murdered Children, Inc.

Minnesota Hope Chapter

P.O. Box 516

Circle Pines, MN 55014

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