The Santa Clarita Valley Chapter of The Compassionate Friends hosted its 24th annual Candlelight Remembrance Program for children, grandchildren and siblings who were taken too soon at BethlehemSCV on Sunday evening.
The evening featured a walkway of memorial lanterns on the entry pathway into the church with boards of photos of all the people who lost their lives, and mini candles to light when the clock hit 7 p.m. to give a wave of light felt around the world.
Alice Renolds, one of the women leading the evening, said that it had been 25 years since she lost her sons, Tim and Danny, in a fatal traffic collision.
“I sat there and just cried at the meetings and couldn’t talk, and gradually came out of that shell, and, you know, listened to everybody talk and talk about their stories and it was a healing process,” Renolds said, recalling the first few months after her sons’ death.
She added that holding the remembrance is important for families as they move through their grief journey, especially around the holidays.
“The holiday season is just like one of the worst times. That grief just comes up, and families are, you know, it’s hard to deal with,” Renolds said about the remembrance. “So, this gives them a space to come see their child’s face on that screen and hear some songs and some poems and hear their name.”
During the evening, Renolds and Diane Briones, the other leader of the event, read the names of people’s loved ones.
The remembrance also included music, live poem readings, a lighting of the memory candles, and a video presentation to acknowledge the lives that were lost.
One mother, Mary Yancey, lost her son, Brian DeCaro, almost four years ago and has been coming to the remembrance ever since.
Having attended the monthly meetings for a while, Yancey says she rarely misses them and that new parents join frequently.
“Unfortunately, we get new parents all the time, and we try to help them through, especially the first year, because that’s probably the, they’re all hard, but it’s probably the most confusing year,” Yancey said.
Yancey said her son’s death was unexpected and that he died when he was 33 years old.
“He, uh, was diagnosed at 14 (years old) with Asperger’s, and so he struggled, um, to gain independence … but apparently, he made a bad decision. He could be very impulsive. And he got ahold of something that had fentanyl in it, so … And I didn’t even know about fentanyl then,” Yancey said.
Ironically, before Brian died, he was able to gain the independence he was so determined to achieve, Yancey recalls.
Yancey says to keep her son Brian’s memory alive, she hikes using his walking stick every week – calling it her “Brian time.”
At the end of the event, Renolds spoke to the audience to remind them of what the candle means: “We hold these candles in memory of our children, grandchildren and siblings. This candle says, ‘I love you.’ This candle says, ‘I miss you.’ This candle says, ‘I will remember you.’”
