Hello, Thank you for visiting Center for Healing Under Grief - HUG. My name is Karen Beach, I am the President, Executive Director and Founder of what I like to call Center4HUG. You are likely visiting our page because you or someone you know has lost a child and are looking for resources. We are here to help parents on their journey.

In May of 2023 I lost my son to Suicide. This rocked my world in ways I cannot even describe in words. I was fortunate to have had the resources available to me and an employer who believes in great benefits for their employees, allowing me to take on the sudden costs, time off to access therapies and support needs associated with the unplanned death of someone so young. Not many have this and if this had happened just 10 years prior, I know we would have really scrambled to try to figure it out.

I was literally buried UNDER the grief. Imagining a way through, to be on top of it, or to allow it seemed utterly impossible. I cannot imagine trying to have had to figure out the resources, financially and emotionally, being forced to have to return to work because there is no other option, and just not having had the support necessesary to go through what I had to go through. There was no putting this on a shelf for later. The trauma and grief demanded my attention. As I looked around, I found these services just don't exist in our communities, or even our state really, from this a HUG was born. The organization name Center for Healing Under Grief - HUG literally is about being so overwhelmed and buried under the grief, trapped under it, that you don't feel there is a way to heal with it, under it, all around it. And while we may not ever “heal” in a traditional sense of the term, we can learn how to accept the grief and walk with it, hold its hand and accept our journey.

As a parent, losing your child is all together a different type of grief than any other loss you may face, or have faced, in life. It is said that a mother feels the part of her DNA that passes with her child's death, I can attest to this whole heartedly. As someone who has always been a very “together” person to have been so lost during all of this was a bit overwhelming. Therapy helped, however there weren't resources like support groups specifically for parents, no services to sign up for meals to just be delivered so I could heal, no resource center I could go to find books, recommendations or ideas from other parents who maybe walked this early road prior to me. The more I found these roadblocks to healing in our community the more determined I became to bring a HUG to all parents facing the loss of their child.

With the support of family, friends, total strangers, and the community, combined with my over 17 combined executive level non-profit experience we raised enough money to form Center for Healing Under Grief - HUG for you and the others who will later have to join us on this journey.