10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, July 25, 2009
By JANET ZIMMERMAN
The Press-Enterprise
Teenager Tony Monnin was just starting to deal with the 2004 suicide of his father when, two years later, his younger brother killed himself.
The magnitude of Monnin's grief was incomprehensible to most people. He kept it locked away, allowing his feelings of anger, guilt and alienation to eat away at him. Then he attended a bereavement camp for children in the San Bernardino Mountains, where he found others his age in the same kind of pain.
"I was just able to relate to them," said Monnin, now 18, who returned this weekend as a counselor at Camp Erin in Big Bear Lake, which he attended for the last two years as a camper.
Oscar Robles, 14, of Cochella, paints a memory box in honor of his mother during Camp Erin, which helps teens who have lost a loved one cope with their grief.
On Saturday, 65 kids from Riverside and San Bernardino counties enjoyed activities designed to help them through the loss of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and best friends.
From crafts and games to ceremonies and sports, everything was geared toward easing grief issues specific to children, said Pamela Gabbay, program director for Mourning Star in Palm Desert, sponsor of the three-day camp.
"Kids don't have the coping skills that we have. They work through a lot of their issues through play," Gabbay said. "A lot of what we do is meeting them in their world."
Camp Erin is an annual event through Mourning Star, a children's grief program administered by the Visiting Nurses Association of the Inland Counties. Mourning Star offices or programs are in Riverside, Murrieta, Banning, Palm Desert and Victorville.
Camp Erin, funded in part by The Moyer Foundation, is a nationwide network of 28 bereavement camps for children.Volunteer Alex Banuelos, 18, of Apple Valley, helps camper Travis Krome, 6, of Hesperia, up a pole during Camp Erin.
When someone dies, people often avoid talking about that person to their loved ones for fear of making them sad. But at Camp Erin, it's all about the loved one and those conversations come naturally, Gabbay said.
The specially trained counselors sit by children during crafts, asking them why their use the colors they do, or how it memorializes their loved one.
In one instance a 6-year-old girl wrote a message to her father, who died in December of a brain tumor, on the lid of a wooden memory box dripping with yellow paint. It read: "Der DaD, i miz you sooo much."
Campers also discover important tools for recovery -- that they are not alone and their feelings are normal.
Monnin, of La Quinta, found comfort in a nighttime camp ritual in which teens turn out the lights in the camp's conference room, light candles, lie on their backs and talk about their loved ones.
He was 14 when he lost his dad and 16 when he lost his brother Andy, who was his best friend and shared his room. Andy was 14 when he died.
Losing his male role model, Monnin said he thrived under the attention of the counselors, called Big Buddies. They coaxed him out of his bunk, where he wanted to stay and sleep because of his depression.
"The Big Buddies would be the ones to say 'Let's play football' or 'Let's get out.' We'd get out there and forget about it. It was a sweet release. We didn't have any of those burdens of home," Monnin said.
Now himself a Big Buddy to eight 9-year-old boys, Monnin had to talk one sleepy camper out of the dorm and into the outdoors.
Campers hold a nighttime ceremony in which they light candles, place them in a canoe and send it across a lake. It is a symbolic way of saying goodbye to their loved one.
"It was the only goodbye I got to say," Monnin said.
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