Comfort Zone Camp: 'I knew I was gonna be OK'

Apr. 13—Say you're a kid.

And you just lost your mom or dad.

Maybe it was a all at once. A heart attack. Or car wreck.

They were there one afternoon ... then they weren't.

Or maybe it was just one of those sad inevitabilities. Cancer, or some other lingering, terminal illness.

Sure, you knew it was going to happen, but that didn't make it any easier when it actually did, huh ?

After the funeral, and you finally got back to school, your friends looked at you a little differently.

You had to put on a show of being strong and "normal " for them.

Sometimes, even though you may not have had the words for it then, you'd even catch your teachers or other adults who were friends of your parents subsconsciously stepping back—just from the enormity of the loss.

At home, especially if you were the oldest kid, you would lean in to be that stand-in adult, as it were, for your younger brothers and sisters.

Stephanie Lytle can tell you all about it.

'That made all the difference'

Lytle, an educator who taught students on the Autism spectrum in Monongalia County Schools and now is a program director at WVU's Autism Support Program, lost her dad when she was 9.

She was grieving and didn't necessarily know it.

Then she discovered Comfort Zone Camp—"And that made all the difference in my life, she said. "It still does."

Comfort Zone Camp, which is headquartered in Richmond, Va., is a nonprofit, bereavement camp for kids coping with the profound loss of a parent or other caregiver who was raising them.

The West Virginia edition runs May 17-19 at Camp Cowen, nestled in the hills of Webster County.

"It sounds like it might be the saddest thing in the world, " said Lytle, a camp veteran, "but I can assure you it's not."

Not with all the requisite swimming, hiking and pranking going on.

"Kids don't have to pretend to be OK, " she said, "because every other kid there has been through the same thing."

There are a couple of things that do mark the camp, however. Counselors gently, quietly, toss out tips on how to cope with grief.

And there's the Healing Circle.

Spellbound, and inspired One Sunday, three years after the death of her dad, Lytle's mother was poring over the newspaper when the Parade magazine supplement plopped out.

She picked it up and started reading.

The words leapt off the page. It was about that camp in Virginia.

A couple of months later, Stephanie, her mom and her brother pulled out of their driveway drove straight to Richmond for the latest camp.

The camp is known for its aforementioned healing circle, where campers, if they want to, can tell their stories.

For many, Lytle said, it's the first time they will have voiced their feelings and fears out loud.

She didn't talk that first night, but a kid from Staten Island did.

David recounted the day his dad didn't come from his job in the Twin Towers: Sept. 11, 2001.

Lytle was both moved and transfixed. And David's telling made her think she was finally ready for her telling, too.

So, that next night in the circle, she talked about her dad and how everybody liked him and how he had that massive coronary during the week of Thanksgiving—which made it sadder, since he was a guy who counted his blessings every day.

She looked down at her hands the whole time, but she could still feel the eyes of her fellow campers, as she had so intently watched David the night before.

And she felt something else. There were no other words for it.

Kinship.

Love, even.

"Everything just kind of lifted, " she said.

The shirt with the blinking letter Lynne Hughes has heard versions of that story seemingly forever now, but don't think she's being dismissive when she says that.

She's the founder of Comfort Zone Camp.

Hughes didn't just lose one parent when she was a kid. She lost both parents when she was a kid.

A blood clot killed her mom.

And, a year later, and right before Hughes' first day of school in junior high, her dad was fatally felled by a heart attack.

She and her brother went to live with an aunt and uncle. Her uncle was cold in his caregiver pragmatism. He didn't expect her to love him and her aunt like she did her mom and dad, he said.

Nor, he said, should she expect the same from them—even though they would always have a place to live.

That made the grief worse, but it made her tougher, she said, even if it was just an act, most of the time.

"When you're a kid and you lose a parent, it's like you're walking around with a scarlet "D " on your shirt for death, " she said.

"You don't want people to notice, so you put on a show."

She graduated college in Michigan, married a guy from Virginia, and settled with him in his hometown in Virginia.

Turns out, that talk with her uncle, cleared the first path for Comfort Zone Camp.

'I wonder if we can do this again ?'

In her heart, she wanted to work with kids.

Kids, especially going through the same thing she went through.

She read every book her eyes could muster on mothers and daughters, and how, say, a 7-year-old processes grief and loss opposed to a 77-year-old.

Hughes and her husband were both longtime camp counselors (that's how they met) and she was thinking of trying such a camp for those kids who were hurting.

She was pregnant with their first child—"Very pregnant, " she said, laughing—when they staged the first one.

To their gratified surprise, it was well-received.

"I wonder if we do this again ?' she asked.

They branched out to New York City and New Jersey after the terror attacks. West Virginia was a key need.

Numbing numbers As many as 6 million children in the U.S. will experience the death of a parent or sibling by the time they are 18, sociologists and health-watchers say.

In West Virginia, Lytle reports, the childhood bereavement rate is 13.3 %, which is highest in the nation.

Put that in a state with a little more than 1 million people, she said, and that's a significant number.

That's why she's putting out a call for volunteers at Comfort Zone Camp's West Virginia stay in Webster County.

It's easy, she said.

Just go to comfortzonecamp.org and pull down the "Get Involved " menu. A criminal background check is part of the process.

Never really gone Hughes, meanwhile, likes that camp kids, more often than not, become volunteer "buddies " and counselors for the effort.

She likes that they grow up, like Lytle, to become teachers.

And physicians.

And others who work in healing professions.

The founder likes the lasting friendships that are formed.

For example, Lytle's best friend from camp was in her wedding, and Lytle's little brother is getting ready to fly to Kansas, so he can be in the wedding of his best friend from camp.

These days, the educator and administrator is never more complimented than when a family member notes that she has the same laugh as her dad and his personality, also—"He never meant a stranger and I guess I'm that way, too."

Thank Comfort Zone Camp for that, she said.

"After that time in the circle I knew I was gonna be OK, " she said.

"Now, my mom volunteers with me. And my dad's presence is always there. Always."