Camp Good Grief Back For 25th Summer

Since 1997, Camp Good Grief, a bereavement camp for grieving children and teenagers, has offered a safe place for children to express their emotions and talk about their loss, while also engaging in fun traditional camp activities.

The one-week camp run by the East End Hospice of Westhampton is entirely free for all campers and takes place at Camp Pa-Qua-Tuck in Center Moriches, a summer camp for kids with special needs run by the Moriches Rotary Club.

Camp Good Grief was first developed in 1997 by a nurse practitioner, a social worker, and an art therapist who found that grieving as a child is especially difficult, and giving children a safe place to talk about their loss with others like themselves could help dissipate feelings of loneliness.

“When people are grieving, it’s obviously difficult to deal with your own emotions, and then to have to try to explain the grieving process and be present for a child is very difficult to do,” Camp Director Angela Byrns said. “Children, they’re often considered the forgotten mourners, so really just to recognize that they do have feelings, they do have understanding, and to give them a space to be able to express that is what we do here at Camp Good Grief.”

Ms. Byrns explained that research shows that children and teenagers typically don’t start expressing their grief until two years after they deal with loss, meaning they put off their grief and bottle up their emotions for much longer than adults do. At Camp Good Grief, children aren’t forced to express their grief, but rather given the opportunity to express it in different ways, whether it be verbally, through art, or through music.

“It’s important for kids to have the space to talk about their loss because a lot of the time they feel like they can’t talk about it,” Ms. Byrns said. “They’re not necessarily going to talk about it with their friends, and they may or may not even talk about how they are feeling with their family. Often kids will hold back because they can see that their parent or guardian is grieving and they don’t want to add to that or be a burden.”

At Camp Good Grief, a typical day consists of group therapy, art therapy, and pet therapy, which are all based in therapeutic frameworks and the research of many psychologists who have found that these activities are beneficial in the grieving process, she explained.

“All of the activities that we do have a certain goal, whether it’s getting to know a camper, looking at their feelings, learning how they cope with loss, and then giving kids the opportunity to talk about the person who they lost and even bring in a picture to talk about that person,” she said.

While most of the activities are therapeutically based, Ms. Byrns also emphasized the importance of play. The camp incorporates activities of choice like swimming, drumming, boating, archery and soccer, and special events like puppet shows or magic shows at the end the day to send campers off on a positive note.

“It’s definitely a therapeutic camp, but when people come they are surprised to see that kids are running around and smiling and laughing,” Ms. Byrns said. “There’s definitely tears, and lots of different feelings of sadness, but there’s also happiness — which is an incredible thing.”

Ms. Byrns, who has been working for East End Hospice for 17 years and first became involved with Camp Good Grief in 2012, said that camp is consistently her favorite week of the year.

“When people ask what I do for a living and I tell them what I do, people do a double take and take a step back,” she said. “But camp is such a special place that it’s hard to put it into words.”

Part of what makes camp so special is the deep sense of community that it fosters among the children who often return to camp for multiple summers, and then end up becoming youth volunteers, and later on adult volunteers.

“Often what ends up happening is they end up becoming a youth volunteer because they know how helpful it was for them to have the camp experience when they were younger, and they want to give that to other children,” Ms. Byrns said. “When you have something like that happening, where these kids continue to come back and want to volunteer their time for something that they felt helped them, I think it speaks for itself.”

Former campers often call to ask “Do you remember us?” and to talk about how fun camp was, and how much it helped them through a tough time, she said.

“Another thing I hear really often is former campers saying they might even consider a different kind of profession because based on their experience here at camp, they see the benefit of working specifically with children,” she added.

Jillian Vargas first attended Camp Good Grief, which was on Shelter Island at the time, after her father died when she was 8 years old. She cited the “loving community” as her reason for returning to camp for two more years as a camper, and then becoming a counselor in 2016 when she was 16 years old.

“It was a whole camp of children who had gone through the same thing as me,” Ms. Vargas said, looking back on her years as a camper. “I just remember feeling like it was okay to talk about my loss with others who could really relate.”

Ms. Vargas said that the fact that a lot of the counselors now have also been campers in the past is truly the strongest testament to just how great the Camp Good Grief community is.

“Camp Good Grief is the best week of my summer no doubt,” she said. “This year, I’m so excited to be with the little kids, and to be able to help anyone, in any way I can, even if it’s just being there to listen, is the most amazing feeling.”