HALAWA — Six months of comfort food, much-needed back rubs, resume-writing advice and donated clothes for job interviews will end Tuesday with the final weekly gathering of former Aloha Airlines employees.

Since April, survivors of what's been called Hawai'i's worst mass layoff could always look forward to Tuesdays at Wellspring Covenant Church.

They could reunite with old co-workers, have a good cry over the loss of their beloved airline and get a couple of bags of donated groceries to help them through unemployment.

The church has offered to continue hosting the weekly gatherings. And companies and strangers are still donating everything from baby wipes to platters of food to help the Aloha employees each week.

But former Aloha flight attendant Valerie Sugawa, who created the weekly event, said the two dozen volunteers who have been helping the Aloha workers "needed to see an end."

So former flight attendant Lyn Correa stood in a tiny knot of former colleagues this past Tuesday inside Wellspring's sanctuary — next to a neat rack of donated business clothes — and contemplated a future without Tuesdays at the church.

She looked around at a scene that included people bringing fresh desserts and steaming trays of stew and beef short ribs — and Sugawa cutting hair for free — and said, "We're going to have to move from withdrawal from Aloha Airlines to withdrawal from this. Everybody's saying, 'I can't believe it's going to be the last one.' It's really sad. How are you going to get through this by yourself?"

But former flight attendant Angel Pablo prefers to believe that something positive will come next.

Pablo and his wife, Bernice, were in the same Aloha flight attendant class 19 years ago and now have a 14-month-old daughter, Anela, as they struggle to find good-paying jobs in a depressed Hawai'i economy.

"It is sad," Angel said. "This has been a place where people can come and bear one another's burdens. But there are a lot of positive things that can come out of sadness."

Wellspring was happy to host the Tuesday events when church members Valerie and David Sugawa came up with the idea after Aloha shuttered its passenger service in April.

David created a Web site — www.sharealohahawaii.org — to coordinate donations to Aloha workers who could use them.

Valerie had left Aloha a year before the shutdown put 1,900 of her former colleagues out of work.

"She felt really worried by what was happening with the Aloha employees," said Dale Vallejo-Sanderson, Wellspring's senior pastor. "It started with her wanting to give free haircuts. Now there are massages, there's shave ice, there's all kinds of food."

Within a couple of weeks, Aloha workers who were so depressed that they could not leave their homes managed to show up at Wellspring "and we felt we needed to keep it going," Vallejo-Sanderson said.

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