Santa Clarita Valley parents are welcoming community members Dec. 14 to a local chapter of The Compassionate Friends’ 14th annual Worldwide Candle Lighting event.

The Compassionate Friends of Santa Clarita are a group providing “highly personal comfort, hope, and support to every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild, and helps others better assist the grieving family,” according to the group’s website.

“No one knows what it is to lose a child,” said Alice Reynolds, a Santa Clarita mother who lost two teenage sons in a car crash 14 years ago. “We go around and we share how we’re feeling what we’re going through at our meetings. We share and give affection.”

(Click here to listen to Reynolds, who, on Monday, was a guest on “Families in Action,” a KHTS AM-1220 broadcast co-hosted by  Action Family Counseling founder Cary Quashen and Bob Sharits of Action.)

TCF hosts its international holiday-time event as part of a special service at Canyon Country Park, which is set to begin at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 14.

Annually, tens of thousands of families, united in loss, light candles for one hour during the Worldwide Candle Lighting, officials said. This year’s theme for the event is “… that their light may always shine.”

“This is our gift to the bereavement community,” said Alan Pederson, executive director of the group’s national organization. “The holiday season is an extremely difficult time of the year for families grieving the the death of a child.”

The candle lighting in the Santa Clarita Valley starts at 7 p.m., and it’s preceded and followed by candle-lighting in the surrounding time zones, also at 7 p.m., “creating a 24-hour wave of light as the observance continues around the world.”

Even more than 10 years after her loss, Reynolds said the group provides her with help, and the feeling that she’s able to turn her tremendous loss into something that can help others, she said.

“People ask me, ‘Why do you still go?’” Reynolds said. “I do because when I first came, I was one of those people who sit and cry and couldn’t talk, and now I go to show those newly bereaved, yeah, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and the pain will ease. I go there to help them.”

The group meets the first Thursday of every month, so the next meeting, for January, is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Fellowship Christian Church.

Click here for information about the local The Compassionate Friends chapter.