It Happened to Me: I Joined the Worst Club With the Best People
Every day, I choke-sobbed with friends. You should try it.
The sudden death of my mom in January 2014 left me absolutely unmoored. I was a thirtysomething New Yorker, and for the next couple of years after that terrible night I tried to fake my way through life, in an angry fog. I had some laughs and good times, sure. But I was so deeply sad and mad, like the Taylor Swift lyric, “I’m miserable and nobody even knows.” Or I thought I was doing a good job of hiding it, anyway. I realize now, everybody knew.
I was a tough hang, and that was quite a change for a people-pleaser. But I’m not mad at myself about it. Grief is a real asshole, and we have to give ourselves and others grace to learn to live with it.
Over lunch one day, a colleague and I discovered we had both lost our mothers and loved going to summer camp as kids. “I was looking for somewhere to put this energy,” she told me. “So I decided to help kids who were going through the same thing. I volunteered at a grief camp.”
As my friend talked about her first time working with Experience Camps — for grieving children who have experienced the death of a parent, sibling or primary caregiver — I had an instant gut feeling that this was something I needed to do. I could only imagine the grief I would have felt if I had been a child when I lost my mother. I wanted to help these kids. And as a Halloween-born Scorpio, I’ve always been extremely big on trusting my intuition, even through the depths of my own grief.
After my mom died, I had managed to take a few steps to pull myself through the Swamps of Sadness. (Shout-out to fellow Gen Xers and elder Millennials still carrying the trauma of The NeverEnding Story inside our bodies.) e.g., I had gotten a therapist (who I still see!) — something I’d long needed anyway. And then a few months after the lunch with my friend, I decided to move back to my hometown of Indianapolis, my New Yorker ego be damned. I needed a lifestyle change. That’s when I applied to be a counselor at the ExCamp in Georgia. And it might just end up being the most important and impactful decision I’ve ever made.