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Young children who have family members who have died learn to ask questions, open up and let go.
By MATTHEW WAITE
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 1, 2001
NEW PORT RICHEY -- One by one, their little legs climbed Question Mountain.
One by one, the children asked: What does cancer look like?
Why did it happen?
Why did I have to see it?
Each of the elementary school age kids who climbed the mountain Tuesday afternoon -- really just two chairs back to back with a green blanket over it -- had all lost someone to death. Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles.
All of them were asking, out loud, a question they had about death at the Hernando-Pasco Hospice Children's Bereavement Camp.
Some of the questions were heartbreaking.
Does it hurt to die and do you age in heaven?
Why do people commit suicide?
Why?
The staff and volunteers at the hospice didn't have many answers, but what they could offer is insight to the ordeal each of the children was going through.
"We never promise them this won't happen again," said Dana Outlaw, the coordinator of the event for the hospice. "Those aren't promises you can make to children."
Through a series of stories and games, the 32 kids who came to the Clarion Hotel on U.S. 19 were led through the Land of Grief, with journeys into the Land of Fog, representing confusion about death; the Ocean of Loneliness, to deal with missing a loved one; the Guilt Swamp, to talk about feeling like they should have done something to help; and the Cave of Fear, to get past any lingering fears of death.
Some of the fears were as minor as spiders and as big as losing their parents the same way they lost their grandparents.
Darrel Goad, a youth and child counselor with the hospice, asked his six kids what their fears were and asked them to draw them on paper. Some drew the dark, others sharks.
And then Goad asked them how they faced their fears.
"Try to do your fears," said 11-year old Marie Gill. "Except for shark bites."
They learned about anger, and how to let anger out in a good way (not kicking the nearest sibling), and made stress balls, or balloons filled with sand that they could grip tight. And Goad told them a story about himself as a young boy, angry and not knowing how to let it out, which resulted in an ulcer.
"If we can teach these kids these coping skills early in life, they'll have that insight so much sooner," he said. That way, each child will better know how to handle something later in life.
At the end of the day, the kids were told to write good memories on a helium-filled balloon. The balloon was to represent all the bad when they let it go, and some good when it got into the sky, where their loved ones were.
Josh Wagner, a 7-year old, had a message so long it nearly wrapped completely around the balloon.
"Granpa," he wrote on the side of a balloon with a big permanent marker, "I will miss you but you are in a better world."
The is the fourth year that Outlaw has been involved in the camp. Each camp is amazing, she said, because the kids are strong, and often more easily in touch with their grief than adults.
"We get all wrapped up in our daily life . . . and it is nothing compared to losing a parent at 7 years old," Outlaw said. "It's really humbling to imagine going through that. I couldn't imagine losing my parents as an adult."
- Staff writer Matthew Waite can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6247 or (800) 333-7505, ext. 6247. His e-mail address is waite@sptimes.com.