REAL PEOPLE/Three Days of Kindness
Where Grieving Kids Can Heal
Lynne Hughes turned her childhood pain into a camp for bereaved youth
Hughes helps campers with a challenge course and kayaks in Utah.
WHEN YOU LOSE both parents as a child, there’s no one left to ask, “How was your day?” You never get back that unconditional love. My mom died when I was 9; my dad when I was 12. Losing your anchors is lonely. My confidence was sapped. I felt like a smashed picture window full of holes.
The summer after my mom died, I went to sleepaway camp for two weeks and fell in love with it. I stepped away from my loss. There, I could just be a kid and not feel outwardly different from my peers. I went again after my dad died. It was really a healing experience. While in college, I got a job as a camp counselor. That’s where I met Kelly, my husband.
After we married, I had lots of jobs, but none felt “important.” I kept searching. And Kelly kept saying to me, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could go back to camp somehow?”
While volunteering for an organization called Motherless Daughters, I met a woman named Barbara. She was 70 and had lost her mother when she was 10. For 60 years, she’d carried her grief and never spoken to another girl who’d lost her mom. She’d never been able to connect to someone who really understood.
That encounter inspired me to say to Kelly, “Let’s do a camp that catches kids at the beginning of their grief journey.” It took two years, but I assembled a board and got funding, and we started Comfort Zone Camp, a nonprofit that creates free three-day camps for kids who’ve lost a parent or sibling. At the first camp in 1999, we had 34 kids. We saw magic and healing happen. Stripped of their phones, campers were just there in nature, playing, getting to be kids again. We sprinkled in support groups and healing circles. Kids told their stories, passed around pictures, shared memories and talked about the hardest parts of losing a loved one. Other kids leaned in and said, “Me too.” By the end of the three days, I could see the kids were lighter, as if they’d dumped out a backpack full of rocks they’d been struggling to carry. And that’s what I see every time we run a camp.
Virginia campers make luminaries in memory of loved ones.
We now do 30 camps a year, renting out sleepaway camps in different parts of the country, and we’ve served more than 27,000 kids. Two of our former campers are now on staff. It’s bigger than I’d ever dreamed. I now know there was purpose to the pain I experienced as a child. It’s what helps me show kids that you can be OK, even after something awful and unfair happens to you.
I’ve learned that in our deathavoidant society, to support someone through grief, you just need to be present. Lean in and say, “I can’t begin to know what you’re going through, but I’d like to try.” —As told to Andrea Atkins
Lynne Hughes, 62, lives in Richmond, Virginia.