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Teens Learn How To Rediscover Life After Death

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By DAVID SOMMER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 25, 2008

ST. LEO - Aunt Marci, Grandpa Tom, Grandpa Jack and Great-Great-Great Uncle Gary will be remembered forever in a little girl's heart.

Catherine Ackling, 7, used glass jewels, plastic hearts and a beetle sticker to decorate a memory box with pictures of all four loved ones Tuesday.

"The jewels are for loving them all and missing them all, and the hearts are for love," Catherine said. "All of them loved to pick beetles out of the yard; they loved beetles."

Catherine said she would use the box to store memories. Her aunt's cell phone will be the first thing that goes in.

"If I write notes to them, I put them in here like treasures and stuff," she said. "That's all I can say."

The Wesley Chapel girl also painted with shaving cream Tuesday, read stories, went swimming, blew bubbles and made a two-faced mask - one side with a smile for the public and another with a frown for her grief.

She was among about 30 children 6 to 12 who attended a one-day camp at Saint Leo University aimed at helping children deal with death.

Camp Sol, aptly named for Tuesday's scorching sun, was the last of four such camps put on by the Hernando-Pasco Hospice under its Children's Assistance Program, which started holding the camps in 1993.

The idea is to help children understand their feelings of loss and anger, and teach them to channel those thoughts into loving memories that will last forever, said grief counselor Laura Moore.

"A lot of the kids here have experienced multiple deaths," Moore said. "We teach them that: 'If I can survive this, I can survive anything.'"

Moore was one of a half-dozen professional counselors and a dozen hospice volunteers working with the children Tuesday.

In addition to the four one-day camps it stages each year for elementary school students, Hernando-Pasco Hospice holds annual weekend sleepover camps for junior high and middle school students who have lost loved ones, spokeswoman Jane Freeman said.

The hospice's main mission is to provide free in-home care and counseling services for the gravely ill and their families, in addition to operating hospice homes and care centers for the dying that are scattered throughout Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties.

Tuesday, however, was all about young mourners.

Aryeal Lane, 9, proudly showed off pictures of Papa Wayne and Nana Beverly.

Matt Bridgmon, 7, said volunteer counselor Michael Tarver taught him to make long dives across the water in the Saint Leo University pool.

Tarver, 14, who attends Dade City High School, said he volunteered to help out because his mother works for the hospice.

Volunteers Candise Poirier, 15; Alan Baumann, 14; and Joe Geschke, 15 - students at Ridgewood High School - said they originally signed up with the hospice to earn the 75 hours of volunteer credits needed to graduate. All three have long since passed that goal.

"We just do it for fun," Baumann said.

By midafternoon, everyone was starting to tucker out. As parents began arriving, youngsters formed a group for a memorial service in which they wrote notes to deceased loved ones on paper butterflies and then attached them to two large helium balloons.

"I love you both," Matt wrote on his butterfly note to his deceased father and grandfather.

Meanwhile, the parents were asked to write their own butterfly notes to be attached to a third balloon. Everyone then met outside to launch the balloons into the sky.

Leslie Dirks, who was greeted by son Nicholas, 9, and daughter Ashley, 7, said the counseling her children have been receiving from the hospice has helped them with the deaths this year of her father and her husband's mother.

She and her husband were expecting the deaths because their parents were in ill health, but the children had never experienced a death in the family, Dirks said.

The family is rebounding, Dirks said. However, no one expected her to become pregnant with Nicholas' and Ashley's soon-to-be baby brother.

"We knew this year we were going to lose both my mother-in-law and my father," she said. "The pregnancy was a bonus."

Reporter David Sommer can be reached at (727) 815-1087 or dsommer@tampatrib.com.

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