At Camp Kerry, families who lost loved ones find community and even a bit of joy

When Jason McMahon’s wife died from a brain tumour in the spring of 2017, he embarked on an arduous journey to find solace. From a hospice he obtained bereavement support; for their then nine-year-old son, he sought out private counselling. Nothing seemed adequate, and they felt alone in their anguish.

Mr. McMahon, a resident of Comox Valley, B.C., continued searching, exhausting local resources and parsing through online search results. Then, in the fall of 2022, father and son arrived at Camp Kerry, a four-day bereavement retreat program designed for families to heal together.

“It was the first time that we didn’t feel alone in our journey,” Mr. McMahon said in an interview at the camp last month, their second year attending. “He gets to be with other youth that have all experienced the same thing. I got to be with other parents that had all experienced the same thing. When we left here last year, we got in the car and the first thing both my son and I said to each other was, ‘Oh my god. We’re not alone.’”

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Held for the last several years at a retreat and conference centre in a bucolic mountain valley near Princeton, B.C., Camp Kerry can be described as a summer camp for bereaved families. The people who attend have often suffered unimaginable loss: parents who have lost children, children who have lost parents, those who have lost a spouse, those whose lives have been forever changed by homicide, suicide, overdose. Participants say a valued component of the camp is not having to explain themselves to people who couldn’t possibly understand.

The programming creates an unusual juxtaposition of grief and joy. At this year’s retreat, participants awoke at dawn to go fishing, hiking and mountain biking, then decorated lanterns in memory of their loved ones. Adults unwound with yoga, massage and meditation, and confided in peers at evening socials. Children gleefully ziplined across a lake, then explored their feelings through art and music therapy.

Vulnerabilities are laid bare in peer group sharing circles, which are led by facilitators and organized by age for children and type of loss for grown-ups. Adult participants in a recent group for those bereaving partners shared complex feelings of anger at their loved ones for leaving, of embarrassment for still speaking to them as if they were alive and of guilt for no longer missing them. Around the circle, heads nodded.

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Heather Mohan is executive director of Lumara Grief and Bereavement Care Society, the charity that runs Camp Kerry. A registered clinical counsellor who specializes in the field of hospice, Dr. Mohan launched the camp in 2007 after seeing an unmet need while working as a therapist on a palliative care team in North Vancouver. Then in charge of a family bereavement expressive arts therapy program, Dr. Mohan was tasked with supporting families from terminal diagnosis through to death and grieving.

“I just felt like we did a really good job of supporting people in the medical system through the dying process but then, as soon as they died, it was kind of like the end of the relationship with the system,” she said. “And so I got interested in how we could create something for families who had had loss, and how we could continue to provide them with a community of support.”

When the family of a patient directed donations to Dr. Mohan’s program, she presented them with the idea of creating a retreat for grieving families, which they enthusiastically supported. The camp is named after that patient, Kerry Kirstiuk, who died of cancer in 2006. The suggested fee is $750 a family – about a third of the cost for the camp to provide programming and accommodations for the group – though no family is turned away because of an inability to pay.

According to the Children’s Grief Foundation of Canada, about one in five children will experience the death of someone close to them by age 18, and such losses can affect a child’s emotional and cognitive development. Several health, palliative and bereavement support organizations, including the Canadian Grief Alliance, have called for the federal government to create a national grief strategy that would help raise awareness of healthy coping strategies and fund grief services such as Camp Kerry.

Camp Kerry launched in 2007 with 10 families on Keats Island, in Howe Sound, B.C. Sixteen years later, it now hosts annual retreats in both British Columbia and Ontario; this year, a total of 145 families applied in both provinces, but the camps could only accommodate 57. In B.C., the number of applicants has tripled since 2021.

Dr. Mohan attributes the surge in demand to three main factors: the COVID-19 pandemic, the toxic drug crisis and the detection of unmarked graves at the former sites of residential schools.

“We don’t really know what the impact of that was,” she said, referring to the discoveries. “But what we know is that we are serving more Indigenous families than we’ve ever served.”

In response, Camp Kerry in recent years added an Indigenous wellness component to its program. Elder-in-residence Vernon Williams, a member of the Haida Nation, says he encourages participants to confront their grief so they can let it go.

One way he facilitates this is with a fire ceremony, in which he instructs participants to write down “anything carrying weight in your heart” and place it in a fire, alongside tobacco.

“When you lose people, you always have the would haves, could haves, the should have saids. The simple act of writing is so powerful, and gives you quite a bit of closure,” Mr. Williams said.

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Patrick Morrissey was in his late 40s in 2009 when his wife and infant daughter were among six people to die in a float plane crash off Saturna Island, B.C., that was so troubling it left rescuers shaken.

The former human-resources co-ordinator said he existed for months in a blur, trying to manage work and raising their other young daughter before an acquaintance suggested Camp Kerry.

“I didn’t know what I was doing,” said Mr. Morrissey, who attended in 2010 and has volunteered with the camp regularly since.

“I had a two-and-a-half year old daughter and didn’t have any clue of how to move forward. I knew I needed something, but I didn’t know what. Once I got involved in camp, I found my tribe.”

He becomes emotional at the memory of his toddler joining other children at the camp, of her no longer being the “special” child whose parent died in a plane crash, of the way the children intuitively supported one another through sadness.

“It’s a very strange space when you have joy and grief actually being held together at the same time,” he said. “You actually can do that. You can hold space for people where they can feel that kind of emotion together, in a safe, supportive environment like Camp Kerry. And it’s life-changing.”

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Lily Friesen first attended Camp Kerry with her mother a decade ago, at age seven. Her father had died just two months earlier, after a long struggle with a brain tumour and multiple sclerosis. Now 17, she remembers how difficult it felt to carry on with life after experiencing such loss as a child, unfamiliar with the weight of grief and how to respond to it.

“We arrived here and, according to my mum, I immediately ran off to go play with the other kids and she got a chance to sit down and breathe for the first time in a couple months,” Ms. Friesen said. “We were both surrounded by hundreds of people who were going through the same thing that we were. It was so comforting, and almost foreign, but it was very welcome.”

The pair returned together every year, until Ms. Friesen’s mother died last year of ataxia, a neurodegenerative disease that also took the lives of her aunt and grandmother. Ms. Friesen returned to Camp Kerry that year with her godfather and another aunt, and was supported by people who had known the pair for years.

Mr. McMahon, the Comox Valley resident, said he was most moved by the peer group sharing circles.

“It was the first time in five years that I heard other parents saying things that I had been saying and had never heard another parent say,” he said. “You know, concerns about raising children as the surviving parent, concerns for our kids, thoughts about finding love again, wanting family for our children. … It was incredible to me to be able to hear that.”

His son Ishan, now 15, says he had little understanding of his feelings when his mother died six years ago. As an adolescent, he’s now more cognizant of his grief and the ways in which it can manifest, such as through unexpected anger. He says the biggest breakthroughs have come from talking frankly with peers in the same position.

“The activities and group have been helpful, but it’s really in the time that nothing is happening that the most happens,” he said.