Quoting Groucho Marx, film director Woody Allen once said facetiously, "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member." But there is a club so universal that adults join and rejoin it many times. The only requirement for membership is living in a world replete with change.

Author¿Melody Beattie¿calls this unofficial club "The Grief Club" in her new book of the same name. She says the club has many subgroups. She unwillingly joined the "My Child Died and My Heart is Broken and Nobody Gets It" subgroup in 1991, when her young son Shane died in a skiing accident. Years later, she became the member of other clubs too, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, the "Empty Nest" club, the "I'm Getting Older" club, and most recently when she was diagnosed with hepatitis C, the "I've Got a Chronic Illness" club.

Beattie writes that most of us find ourselves joining these clubs whether we want to or not. "Some of the clubs are formal. Sometimes we meet people one at a time going through a similar experience as us. When a problem first appears we think we're the only one who has it. We feel alone but soon it looks like everyone has it," writes Beattie. "When we join the club, other people become the mirror. Through them, we see ourselves and gain an understanding of what we're going through."

Beattie illustrates this point in a story about a grieving mother who pleaded with a Buddha to bring back her dead son. The Buddha said he would grant her request but the mother must first bring him three rocks from three people or families who had never experienced loss. A long while later, the mother returned empty-handed. Like Beattie, this woman discovered the universality of grief. Like Beattie, this woman became another unwilling member of the Grief Club.

All of us experience losses and changes, big and small, from empty nests to empty and broken hearts. Accepting loss as part of the human condition can help us put strategies in place for "healthy grieving" when significant loss does strike. Recovering people like Beattie, author of the best-seller "Codependent No More," can be excellent mentors in this process. They've learned how grief and disappointment make you vulnerable to alcohol and drug abuse. You try to drown your sorrows or anesthetize your pain, but this only masks and postpones the grief. Honoring our feelings, especially the difficult ones, teaches us there is life during and after loss--life made richer because we are aware enough to appreciate all its dimensions.

Recovering people have also learned the value of talking and listening about loss in a group of people with whom you can be honest and vulnerable, who will not judge you or your way of grieving. Sometimes close friends and family are unable to provide unencumbered support because they are too enmeshed in their own grief, or the situation is too mired by history or clouded by worry. Mutual-help groups or qualified grief counselors or therapists can often offer more objective help when it comes to sorting out the confusing and often overwhelming feelings that loss brings.

Beattie also suggests making a "Master Loss List," an inventory of losses and changes that you've experienced to date. It helps to review how we've dealt with these experiences in the past--whether or not we acknowledged or denied the loss, what we learned, whom we turned to, whom we could have turned to, what we could have done differently. Making this list during a relatively calm period of life can help us prepare for tumultuous times that will inevitably come.

Understanding and honoring our own responses to grief, loss, and change, grows compassion in us so we can better support those we care about when they experience loss. We realize that we are all members of the same club, bumping along together on the shared path called life.¿

For more on Beattie's book "The Grief Club," visit Hazelden's online bookstore, or call 800-328-9000.

--Published August 21, 2006