WINGDALE, NY – Under the cover of Darkness, Daisy Talbot and Ally Haffler share secrets.
They squeeze into two beds like other girls and sardines, screaming for floor space, sticking with sour patch kids and takis chips sugar and lime juice. They talk about Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, “The Summer I Tunder Pretty” (consensus is Team Conrad) and discuss the correct pronunciation of the word “caramel.”
They joke with dark humor that makes them understandable about being in a “dead parent club.” They talk about how loss shaped their lives in a quiet and relentless way.
They come from different states, are of different grades and have different stories. But here, in the overdose loss camp, they are girls in cabin 13, tied up with the pain that the child has to endure.
“People got it right away if I didn’t explain anything,” says Talbot.
Overdose Sadness Camp is full of children who lost their parents to opioids
Between 2011 and 2021, more than 321,000 children in the US lost their parents to drug overdose. There are places they can come to talk about it.
The conversation continues on the rattle pouch of the cabin. This was only seen by cricket, Chicadas and occasional freight train symphonies at night. After the young campers go to sleep and the Milky Way comes out above their heads, they begin to peel off their layers of sorrow, sharing a fear they rarely told anyone else:
I want to take my medicine, but I’m afraid of getting addicted.
What if you overdose and lose someone else?
I’m afraid to end like my father.
These are the types of conversations that occur during this weekend’s free retreat for children aged 7 to 17 who have lost their parents or siblings due to overdose. The Comfort Zone Camp (CZC), held from September 12-14 this year, launched its program in 2022, the first one-night camp of its kind, due to the growing need for overdose-specific support at general grief camps.
“When you can isolate that loss and put them all together, that’s when the real magic happens because stigma just kind of disappears,” says Christa Colopy, CZC’s Northeast Regional Director. “We’re not curing them. We’re just setting them up to set them up with toolboxes with different coping skills so they can get out into the world.”
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Talbot was three years old when his father, Luke, died of sleeping from an opioid overdose. She was the one who found him.
Something as simple as a daddy daughter dancing, Father’s Day, or dinner with a friend’s family reminds her that she is not only saddened her father, but also saddened the opportunity she grew up.
Currently she has attended two of CZC’s general grief camps, the first time she’s had at an overdose-specific camp. Campers come to talk about a variety of things over the weekend. Many children had close relationships with those they had lost. Some people have been caught up in foster parents due to family addiction.
“There’s no need to explain, there’s already this shared, unspoken understanding,” says Lydia, Talbot’s mother. “She’s back every time. I just feel grateful, but I’m nervous about going back to a world where she doesn’t have it anymore.”
The camp was necessarily created, Collopy says. Between 2021 and 2022, the organization noticed a 30% surge in overdose losses referenced in general grief camp applications. It is funded through a partnership with A Little Hope, a childhood bereavement nonprofit.
“We have noticed so many overdose losses have been happening during Covid as people are trying to deal with the lockdown of being at home and their feelings and being closed.
Some campers are back in their third year and are excited to be back. Others were pushed into the car and nervous at the prospect of a 48-hour phoneless hour filled with stories of emotions. However, at 4pm, 28 campers and 46 volunteers play icebreakers in the grass fields of Camp Prama, Berkshire.
After dinner, the camper can get their first glimpse of the weekend when it was surrounded by gymnasiums. The crowd of violent children grows quietly when volunteer social worker Jen Harris tells him he’s overdose and loses his younger brother. When she received the call, she was shy for two weeks to graduate from college. Opioids.
In her grief, Harris struggled to reconcile his brother’s two personas. He was a top-class scholar with love and a stubborn fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was also manipulative, difficult and self-destructive. Many children can be involved.
“I loved my brother. I loved who he was, but I hated who he was when he was using it,” says Harris, who has volunteered for 15 years.
One day, Harris tells the camper that she is still angered and awake. She began to realize that the lump in her throat formed when she told her story was a love she couldn’t give him.
Storytelling is an age-specific support group called healing circles and takes place on a more intimate scale throughout the weekend. The camp has four healing circles, each led by a facilitator with clinical experience. All campers are also paired with “big buddies” volunteers. He joins the circle and is by their side throughout the weekend.
“This relationship, that’s a magical ingredient,” says volunteer Wally Brown. “We had the same connection. He lost his sister and I lost mine too.”
Throughout the weekend, campers also take part in high energy activities such as rope courses and team challenges designed to build trust and resilience. In the younger group, children brainstorm the coping skills of each letter of the alphabet and write down healthy ways to take care of themselves: talking with friends, listening to music, journaling.
Some children open up at unexpected moments. During sandy beach volleyball games or while eating ice cream sandwiches in the noisy dining hall.
“Sadness is like the big hands on your face, and every time you share your story, or you hear someone else’s story, your hands move even more from your face,” says Colopy.
“They made bad choices, but they loved us.”
The only memories of some children’s loved ones are bad people. They find heroin needles in the toilet, find an empty orange pill bottle, and are asked for cash.
But the photo book is laughing at Disney World, flying through the waves on the beach, playing in the park.
“People have this image of what addicts look like. To us, addicts look like our sister, our brother, our mother, our father,” says Talbot. “They made bad choices, but they loved us.”
Anger, guilt, regret, and even even comfort relief are normal with the loss of overdose, and part of the camp’s goal is to teach children that it’s okay to feel conflicting emotions about the people they’ve lost.
They will carry harsh emotions – and they also watch the “Chicago Fire” that reminds them of their family. We support the Patriots of New England. He wears a vintage New York Giants jacket. Listen to DMX.
When a high school healing circle camper says he feels guilty about raising his father to make his mother cry, Harris says, “You’re not making them sad, it’s the sadness they’ve experienced.”
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Grown up in the shadow of the opioid crisis
Many of these children are teenagers of parents who fell victim to the prescription opioid boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. More than 321,000 children in the United States lost their parents from drug overdose between 2011 and 2021, according to a study by federal health researchers published in JAMA Psychiatry. Today, more than 100,000 people die from drug overdose each year in the United States, with nearly 70% of deaths being caused by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl.
Some campers are older than when their parents first started using them. In high school, many of them navigate ways to deal with facing the same substance that seduces their parents.
“I have a friend who is doing drugs and I don’t know how to feel about it,” says Haufler, 15. She slowly brought their photos with her this weekend, sticking out their tongues. “You see the possibility of what will happen and it just hurts.”
“I don’t want to lose them either,” she adds.
In a way, today’s teenagers are encountering a system that is more attractive and dangerous than the generations that came before them. Six of the 10 fake prescription drugs contain potentially fatal doses of fentanyl, according to the Drug Enforcement Bureau, which led the “One Pill Kill” campaign.
The camp wants to help teens with tools that can guide this landscape and their sadness in the real world.
“It’s only three days, three intentional days, because we’re setting ourselves apart for a long time,” Collopy says.
On Sunday afternoons, a stomach full of hot dogs and burgers comes and the camper exchanges hugs and phone numbers. They are afraid of train rides, schoolwork to their respective states, and are returning to the only child in their class to lose an overdose.
Their grief doesn’t end in camp, but now they know how to carry it.
Rachel Hale’s role in covering youth mental health at USA Today is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editor input.
Contact her at rhale@usatoday.com and @rachelleighhale.
