Jun
28
I am coming off one of the very best weeks I’ve had this year. Each weekday I was volunteering with a day camp, another lovely service provided by the kids’ grief org I’ve been working with. This was an arts and story camp, focused on all kinds of different art styles with the main activity of creating a little book. The book could be about anything — fiction, non-fiction, something that was related to the person they lost, or not. The pages were regular 8.5 x 11” art papers and could be filled with whatever they chose. Words, pictures, painting, collage.
We had five campers, all girls between the ages of 11 and 13, and I would love to describe them in great affectionate detail but of course I need to be extremely careful about their privacy so I won’t, but in general terms each of them was so unique from the other and I adored them all.
They were at such a delicate age of growing up — something about middle school girls makes me think of the milky stems at the bottom of a blade of grass. Those coltish legs. Grown-up features starting to emerge from the softness of childhood. Bracelets, fingernail polish, hairbands; I’m delighted by it all. I was a boy mom and I was also a middle school girl, there is both an exoticness and a familiarity to this sort of company.
Every morning we started off with a short group ceremony of sorts, sharing something about the people we have lost. I mostly talk about my grandparents and my uncle in this setting, long-ago deaths that aren’t as fresh and impactful as what these kids are dealing with. This is actually something I struggle with a bit, the fact that my experience with death is not like theirs. But no one ever gives me the feeling that this is less relatable or that I can’t understand. And I do think this work has led me to both access old grief that I am not sure I properly processed at the time, and the newer grief of family loss through divorce (which I don’t share about when we are talking about death because it is of course not the same, but I think about it often).
Afterwards we would spend a couple hours working on our books, or just making whatever art sounded appealing. There were two rooms to move between as we chose, and the rhythm usually settled into focused activity with lots of conversation happening between kids and volunteers. We talked about movies, TV shows, cartoons we all loved, favorite foods, school bullies, worst and best teachers, family adventures, all sorts of things. Sometimes one of the program leads would play music from their phone and at one point someone requested Justin Bieber’s “Baby” and every single kid sang along! I wished I knew it so I could sing too.
Then there was snack time and playing outside with a giant Connect Four game and oversized Jenga blocks and buckets of colored chalk and bracelet-making materials and a contraption with two big handles and a rope that could be dipped into bubble solution and used to produce the hugest bubbles I’ve ever seen, then it was lunch, and then the afternoon usually whipped right by and we ended it with a yoga teacher who came every day and we did gentle yoga outside under the trees.
The idea of a children’s grief camp sounds pretty depressing on the surface, doesn’t it? Or like it would just be so incredibly hard. The truth is that most of the time these gatherings, whether it’s a support group or day camp or the late summer overnight camp, are pretty special. You’ve got kids in this rarified environment that is not school or being at home, where they are with other kids who are going through the same thing they are, and while they are asked to be in touch with tough feelings there is so much play and care and support. Sometimes these are the times when they have the most focused attention and support, because of home situations.
Of course sometimes things ARE sad, and it’s often in a quietly devastating sort of way before things move right on, because that’s how kids work. I was talking to one girl who said she had forgotten how to ride her bike, and I made some light joke about how she probably hadn’t – isn’t that the one thing they say we never forget? And she said well my dad died on a bike. Ah, I said, I’m sorry, I understand that then. We just kept coloring and pretty soon we were laughing about Would You Rathers.
I liked everything about this week including the surprisingly peaceful, therapeutic process of making art. Was my art amazing? No. Did it matter, also no. I took an online workshop a while back and the artist who led it said something that stuck with me: “All mark making is healing.”
Yesterday I hauled out the few art supplies I have and sat myself down on the floor with some paper and told myself to just make stuff for the length of an album. I doodled, colored, painted a bit with an old makeup brush, continually shooed away the pets, and oh gosh, it felt good.
I hope I can keep that going. What a gift that would be to embrace from a week that already gave me so much.
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What a gift your week was!
Way back in the time machine I was a camp counselor at the sleep away camp I attended as a camper for manymanymany years. My favorite age group to live with was the middle school aged girls.
Your mention of everyone singing, “Baby” brought back a crystal clear memory of a morning at camp. About 50 girls and counselors were gathered in the rec hall for a relaxation/meditation activity. There was music in the background. James Taylor “You’ve got a Friend” was the last song played. We were all lying on our backs, and spontaneously everyone started singing. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the song was over. Thank you for unlocking that.