‘Magic Happens’: A Camp for Kids Who’ve Lost Family to Overdose

A grief camp for kids bereaved by overdose

Daisy Talbot and Ali Haufler are forever friends now, having turbobonded in less than three days. Undergirding their connection is the experience that connects every participant at Comfort Zone Camp’s Overdose Loss Grief Camp:. They’ve all lost an immediate family member to drug overdose: Talbot, who is 14, and Haufler,15, lost their dads. “This,” Talbot tells USA Today, pointing to Haufler, “would take me six months at home.” But, at the camp, “people just instantly got it without me ever having to explain anything.”

“When you are able to kind of isolate that loss and bring them all together, that’s when the real magic happens because the stigma just kind of disappears,” says CZC’s Northeast Senior Regional Director Krista Collopy. “We’re not curing them, we’re just setting them up to leave with a different toolbox of coping skills so that they can go out into the world.” 

The organization runs other grief camps, but this one, specific to overdose loss, was created three years ago for youth ages 7 to 17 in response to growing necessity. The organization saw mention of overdose losses in their general grief camp applications rise by 30% in just one year, from 2021 to 2022. 

“We realized that during COVID, there was so much overdose loss that was happening because people were at home and were trying to deal with their emotions and the confinements of being at home and under lockdown, and the result was really triggering,” she explained. The camp is free and funded through a partnership with the childhood bereavement nonprofit A Little Hope.

The weekend’s activities integrate classic fun – ropes courses, volleyball, ice cream– with authentic conversations about grief and tons of practical and tangible support. Kids have the freedom to share their sadness, and express lingering fears, like, “I want to go on medication, but I’m afraid of getting addicted,” or, “I’m terrified of ending up like my dad.” There’s no judgment, just understanding. “There may be a lot of anger, hate, shame, and embarrassment [about overdose] as opposed to when someone is diagnosed with cancer,” the CZC website notes, and counselors are prepared to help campers navigate that.

Each camper is also paired with a “Big Buddy,” a volunteer who shares their experience of loss and supports them all weekend. They tell their stories together in healing circles. As one volunteer explained, “Grief is like a big hand right in your face, and every time you share your story, the hand moves further and further from your face.” Most campers have painful memories of their lost loved ones – needles in the bathroom, empty pill bottles – but they also have beautiful ones. Drug addiction killed them, but they were more than just addicts: they were parents who took them to Disney World, siblings who splashed in the ocean, and family members who laughed with them. “They made bad choices, but they loved us,” Talbot says.

By Sunday, campers are hugging, swapping phone numbers, and preparing to go back to classes where no one else shares their experiences. Thankfully, the camp equips kids with tools that have staying power, as well as the knowledge that, despite their grief, they are not alone. “It’s only three days, and it’s three days on purpose,” Collopy says, “because we’re setting them up to leave the whole time.” 

Autism isn’t new. We just used to call it something different.

The Trump Administration’s campaign to eliminate autism, with claims that the condition may be “entirely preventable,” is dangerous, wrong, and deeply unscientific, according to Professor Roy Richard Grinker, author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, writing in a guest column published by the New York Times. The fact that we hear more about autism now, he writes, speaks to scientific advancements, including early detection, better education, and improved therapies. (Take a look at our review of Dr. Grinker’s extraordinary book Nobody’s Normal, which makes a compelling argument for embracing neurodiversity.)

Key facts undercut the administration’s narrative. Citing “dozens of rigorous studies,” Grinker notes that vaccines do not cause autism. Furthermore, genetics are multifaceted: He quotes neurogeneticist Stanley Nelson as saying “If you had 100 kids with autism, you could have 100 different genetic causes.” And here’s the real humdinger – researchers increasingly view autism not as a single disorder along one narrow spectrum, but as “autisms,” between which symptoms, severity and biological pathways vary widely. That complexity is why promises of a “fix” are ludicrous and untenable. “The neurobiology is too complex for easy explanations,” Grinker says. “The more we learn, the more we realize that scientific answers to the question ‘What causes autism?’ or even ‘What is autism?’ will take a long time to unravel, no matter how quickly a government official wants them.”

“We’ve come too far to go back to a time when autism was a stigmatized condition defined solely in terms of deficits,” Grinker writes. “There is an especially pressing need to study how people with autism change over their life span, and which treatments and services help them thrive. Autism research has long focused on children, but people’s ability to change doesn’t end when they turn 21.” 

He adds that his daughter Isabel, who is autistic, ”is today one of the happiest and busiest people I know, but many of the strides she made to get there happened as an adult… What matters most to Isabel isn’t finding someone to blame, since she likes herself the way she is. What matters to her is continuing to build a meaningful life with the social supports and opportunities that were unavailable to people with autism in the past.”

In other news…

Tin Can phones: Want your kid to be able to stay connected to their friends without a whole smartphone? Consider a phone and plan from Tin Can – phones that remind some of us of putting a string through two empty tin cans as kids and pretending they were phones. New York Mag tested the device, which costs about $100 and requires Wi-Fi and electricity. Users can call any other Tin Can for free, or opt for the option to dial any number – grandparents, say – for a monthly fee. What’s especially attractive to parents are the controls that block all unknown numbers and the ability to shut down the line at certain times. The charming, colourful landlines are best recommended for middle childhood, particularly the 7 to 9 year old set, who may be starting to want cell phones – an alternative option for staying in touch with friends and family might help parents delay getting them one. 

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For as much anti-vaccine talk as RFK, Jr. has drummed up these days, the truth is, most Americans aren’t resolutely anti-vax. A growing number are, however, vaccine hesitant. There’s an important difference, but our increasing vaccine hesitancy is still a threat to public health, Jennifer Reich, professor and author of Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines, writes in a guest column for the New York Times. 

“Some parents design their own vaccine schedules, often customizing for each child based on their perceptions of risk, benefit and how they believe their child will handle it. Often, these families don’t consider themselves anti-vaccine. They just trust their own judgment more than expert recommendations,” Reich writes. “But the outcome is the same: Their children are not immunized at the ages when they’re most vulnerable to the worst outcomes of infection and can spread disease to others. The growth of vaccine hesitance in America may feel inexplicable, ignorant or irrational to those who feel confident in their decisions to vaccinate. Yet my research suggests that this approach to vaccines is entirely logical in a culture that insists that health is the result of hard work and informed consumer decisions and too often sees illness as a personal failure.”