"Grief is about remembering," part 1: Camp

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent this past weekend at Camp Forget-Me-Not/Camp Erin DC, a free weekend camp for children ages 6-16 who have experienced a death-related loss. The camp is sponsored, organized and run by the Wendt Center for Loss and Healing ( http://www.wendtcenter.org/), the amazing agency where I completed my second clinical placement. Camp was an amazing, intense experience and easily one of the best things I've ever done. Here are just a few highlights:

Camp is put on by a small number of staff and a huge number of volunteers. Every single kid is paired with an adult "grief buddy," who accompanies them through the entire weekend. The kids are divided into small grief groups by age, and the groups are led by a licenced mental health clinician and a group assistant. All of the volunteers have also lost someone to death and they all share their own losses with the children. The common bond of grief is really powerful. The kids are able to learn from the adults' journeys, but I also learned a lot from the kids in my group. I was with a group of five 12 year-old girls, all of whom were amazingly candid about their own experiences and asked brave and insightful questions about mine. I was sharing about the losses of my two grandmothers (one in 2001 and one in 2003) and I definitely left the weekend with new insights about how I have experienced those losses.

The Wendt Center staff have been putting on Camp Forget-Me-Not for over 10 years, and they clearly know what they are doing. The activities over the course of the weekend built on one another beautifully. Friday evening's activities helped the children and volunteers get to know each other and ease into the topic of grief and loss. On Saturday, the heavier sharing and processing activites were interspersed with physical and artistic activities to help the kids de-compress and get their feelings out. Saturday night, everyone participated in a memorial boat launch, in which we released boats we had decorated in honor of our loved ones while their names were read aloud. Afterward, the children (and adults) had time to cry and process (there was a lot of both in our group), and then they got to enjoy free time and a fun carnival. The girls in our group chose to use their free time "making over" all of the adult volunteers in our cabin. For me, this was one of the most poignant and fun experiences of the whole weekend. On Sunday, all of the activites were centered around remembering the time and relationships built at camp and looking forward to the future. Throughout the weekend, the kids were exposed to all kinds of ways to express themselves and cope with feelings: talking, writing, drama, art, music, play, and sports.

All weekend, I kept being reminded of the things I wrote about in my last post: the universality of grief and how much we all need to talk about it. It was amazing seeing how much benefit our girls derived from just a weekend of sharing stories of grief and loss. It was equally amazing to see how much I and the other adults still needed to talk about our own losses. Every second of the weekend felt so amazingly important and worthwhile. I can't think of many other experiences where I felt 100% engaged and committed the entire time.

I'm not doing camp anything near justice in this post, but if I've intrigued you, I hope you will consider volunteering or referring a child in the future. It happens every year. You can also make a much-needed donation to support the program at any time by visiting the Wendt Center site: http://www.wendtcenter.org/.