Everyone kept the petting zoo a surprise, so the happy rush of kids taking selfies with a llama named Tony and climbing into the pen with two Polish chickens is unexpectedly joyous.
Staff and volunteers have intentionally made the morning nothing but fun. With the drumming circle and singing, the coloring and story time, this could be a regular summer camp. But the 42 children enrolled in Camp Monarch, a service of Angela Hospice in Livonia, Michigan, are here for a dual purpose.
They’re here to enjoy themselves, but also to remember lost loved ones, learn coping skills for the grief that will follow them through their childhoods and to connect with people who understand the complex emotions and behaviors that stem from bereavement.
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One child out of every 11 in Michigan — nearly 200,000 total — will experience the death of a parent or sibling by the time they turn 18, according to Judi’s House, a research organization focused on child bereavement data. By the time youth hit 25 years old, that number more than doubles.
The children at Camp Monarch have lost parents, siblings or other close loved ones from homicide, suicide, car accidents, overdoses, COVID or other health conditions.
Yet our culture doesn’t teach children how to grieve, rarely validates their experiences or acknowledges their pain. Grief camps are a place where, just for a day or two, children who have lost someone they love can connect with other kids who are walking the same heart-rending road, and know they aren’t alone.
“Grief shared is grief diminished,” said Debbie Vallandingham, Angela Hospice’s director of grief care services. “We want to instill in children that being open, talking, sharing, being able to discuss your feelings is a normal part of life, not something that we should hide or something that we should be embarrassed of.”
Can I visit Mommy in heaven?
Children don’t grieve the same way adults do. Adults swim down that river at their own pace, sometimes swept along, sometimes dragged under and sometimes, especially after time has passed, able to float. Children tend to hop in and out of those waters, experiencing deep sadness, isolation and anger but then running outside to do cartwheels.
Their ability to make sense of a loss and process their thoughts and feelings is very much dependent on their developmental stage, according to Joshua Magariel, regional director of patient experience with AccentCare Hospice and Palliative Care, which offers the long-running Camp Kangaroo in Detroit each year.
A very young child might not understand the permanence of death or might conceive of it as a place. Mom is in heaven, but maybe I can go visit her, a little kid might think.
An older child understands that death can’t be undone but might struggle to deal with the complex emotions that follow or deploy harmful magical thinking — believing their actions somehow caused the tragedy.
For bereaved children, every advance in understanding and awareness ushers in a fresh round of processing grief.
“Most parents don’t realize that the kid’s going to keep revisiting this until they are literally an adult,” said Vallandingham. “That’s a lot for their adult to handle, usually, because they move at a very different pace than that child that’s grieving.”
‘They are not alone in this journey’
At Camp Monarch, kids from age 5 to 15 are learning that grief is like a jungle. It has dark, menacing shade and thorny overgrowth but also patches of sunlight and unexpected secret waterfalls. A hunt for paper sloths reminds them to take things slowly. Music therapist Heather Dean leads them in deep “monkey breaths,” and other volunteers encourage them to get support and find their pride, as a lion might.
Each child has brought a photo of the adult they lost to hang, along with a note or thought, on a green paper leaf, clipped and strung up across a hallway to simulate a jungle passage where their loved ones are memorialized. They’ll walk through it, seeing all the other leaves that aren’t their own.
“The important thing is the kids see they are not alone in this journey,” said Leah Bengel, a social worker who volunteered for this year’s Camp Monarch.
Bengel lost her mother to suicide when she was 12 years old, and went to a camp like this one, through the Henry Ford SandCastles grief support program. Now, she says, “I’m here to support the kids through their grief journey like so many people were there to support mine.”
Bengel remembers her camp experience as allowing her to just be a kid but also devote time to expressing her grief in different ways, including art. “It’s a memorable experience that obviously has impacted what I do today,” she said. “I would have felt lost without programs like this.”
“For some kiddos, camp may truly be the only place where they have an opportunity to grieve openly, to be encouraged to find support and meaning in their loss,” said Magariel.
‘You carry her in your heart’
A little boy sits with Camp Monarch volunteer Shalyn Fuller, coloring his small portion of a memorial tablecloth. “Did your mom die?” he asks her. “No,” she responds, “but my baby brother did.”
“How did he die?” the boy wants to know. And Fuller tells him, simply, honestly.
“I lost my mom,” says the little girl across the table.
“I lost my mom, too,” the boy says.
“We went to the hospital to visit her for two days,” the girl says. Then, a pause. “My mama died,” she says again quietly.
“Now her heart beats in your heart,” Fuller says to her, and to the listening boy sitting beside her, coloring absentmindedly. “When your heart beats, her heart beats because that’s where she lives. You carry her in your heart.”
“What’s your mom’s name?” Fuller asks the littler girl. She’ll write it for her, she offers, in a heart she’s drawn on one of the blank spots on the tablecloth.
“Mommy,” the little girl answers.
‘I wish that people understood how hard it is’
It can be hard for adults to talk to children who are grieving. For surviving parents, their own grief can feel insurmountable. Other adults just don’t want to make things worse.
“A lot of adults shy away from this stuff because they don’t want the kids to feel bad,” said Jasmine Kendrick, Angela Hospice’s grief care counselor. “But they need to express it.”
Kendrick says children want the adults and friends in their life to know what they’re going through and that they need help. She speaks from experience. Kendrick was just 4 years old when her mother passed away. She never got to attend a grief camp or get counseling, but she’s grateful for the ways her family kept the memory of her mom alive for her.
That’s what Essra Mokachar is trying to do for her own children. Zack, 15, and Jenna, 12, are at Camp Monarch today, and she sends them to other grief camps and support groups to make sure they have an outlet and a network.
The Mokachars lost their dad suddenly to a heart attack, nine days before their baby sister was born to a shell-shocked family that didn’t know how they would go on without him.
Two years later, they still have their days. “One cries and the other picks them up,” as Mokachar puts it.
Zack Mokachar says these camps remind him that it’s OK to ask for help and that he’s not alone in his grief. “I wish that people understood how hard it is,” he said. “You don’t know what people are going through.”
But the other kids at grief camp do. A boy Zack and Jenna met at another grief camp also lost his father, and now his mom and Essra Mokachar are great friends.
“I’m always looking for resources, and I find that it’s a good release for them,” Mokachar said. “I’m so happy we live in a community where this is available to us.”
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Walking through the jungle of grief
It’s time for the children at Camp Monarch to walk through the jungle of memorialized loved ones, the faces of parents and other beloved family members dangling just overhead along with the words of the children they left behind: “I love you. I wish we could play one more time. Are you doing OK? We’re doing OK.”
Each camper writes a note to the adult they’re missing on special paper that dissolves in water. Once they walk through the memorial, they’ll drop their message into a bucket representing a waterfall and watch it become froth.
enna Mokachar goes first, slowly taking in the pictures and childlike writing of the other kids at camp. A girl breaks down crying, and Bengel puts her arms around her, tears filling her own eyes as she slowly walks her to the bucket and onward. Two sisters with bows in their hair cling to a volunteer, their sobs echoing down the hallway.
It is an exquisite and unique kind of pain to hear a child cry for someone they’ve lost and can never hold again.
Last to journey through the jungle is a little boy who walks dolefully down the hall, his eyes downcast, until he reaches the bucket and stops. He cannot go forward. Kristina Kosta, an Angela Hospice nurse, is dressed as a giant monarch butterfly for this occasion. She envelops him in her beautiful purple wings and her knee digs hard into the cold floor so that he can sit for a moment in softness.
Dean, the music therapist, strums a guitar at the end of the corridor, singing the refrain to “You’ll be in My Heart.”
In the stark hallway, her voice sounds angelic.
