WINGDALE, New York ― Under the cover of darkness, Daisy Talbot and Allie Haufler are sharing secrets.
They squeeze like sardines with the other girls onto two beds and clamor for space on the floor, fingers sticky with sugar and lime juice from Sour Patch Kids and Takis chips. They talk about Sabrina Carpenter’s new album, “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” (the consensus is Team Conrad) and argue about the right pronunciation of the word “caramel.”
They joke with the kind of dark humor only they can understand about being in the “dead parent club.” They talk about how loss has shaped their lives in quiet, relentless ways.
They come from different states, are in different grades and carry different stories. But here, at Overdose Loss Camp, they’re just the girls of cabin 13, bonded by a kind of pain no child should ever have to endure.
“People just instantly got it without me ever having to explain anything,” Talbot says.
The conversation continues on the cabin’s rickety porch, witnessed only by a symphony of crickets, cicadas and the occasional freight train passing in the night. After the younger campers have gone to bed and the Milky Way has emerged overhead, they begin to peel back the layers of their grief, sharing fears they’ve seldom told anyone else:
I want to go on medication, but I’m afraid of getting addicted.
What if I lose someone else to overdose?
I’m terrified of ending up like my dad.
These are the kinds of conversations that happen during this free weekend retreat for kids ages 7 to 17 who’ve lost a parent or sibling to overdose. Held from Sept. 12-14 this year, Comfort Zone Camp (CZC) launched the program in 2022 — the first overnight camp of its kind in the country — after seeing a growing need for overdose-specific support at its general grief camps.
“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.”
Teaching kids how to confront their grief
Talbot was 3 years old when her dad, Luke, died in his sleep from an opioid overdose. She was the one who found him.
Daddy-daughter dances, Father’s Day or something as simple as dinner with a friend’s family remind her she’s not just grieving her dad, she’s grieving the opportunities she’s missed growing up without one.
Now 14, she’s attended two of CZC’s general grief camps, but this is her first time at the overdose-specific one. Campers come into the weekend with different stories — a lot of kids had close relationships with the person they lost, others barely knew them. Some wound up in foster care because of their family member’s addiction.
“There isn’t a need to explain. There’s already this shared unspoken understanding,” Talbot’s mom, Lydia, says. “She’s come back each time, just feeling certainly grateful, but nervous to jump back into a world where she doesn’t have that anymore.”
The camp was created out of necessity, Collopy says. Between 2021 and 2022, the organization noticed a 30% spike in overdose losses referenced in their general grief camp applications. It’s funded through a partnership with the childhood bereavement non-profit A Little Hope.
“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,” Collopy says.
Some campers are returning for their third year, excited to come back. Others were forced into the car, nervous at the prospect of 48 phone-free hours filled with talk about feelings. But come 4 p.m., 28 campers and 46 volunteers are sprawled out in a grass field at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires playing ice breakers.
After dinner, campers get their first real glimpse of what the weekend is about when they’re corralled into the gymnasium. The crowd of rowdy kids grows quiet as volunteer Jenn Harris, a clinical social worker, tells them about losing her younger brother to overdose. She was two weeks shy of graduating college when she got the call. Opioids.
In her grief, Harris struggled to reconcile her brother’s two personas. He was the loving, top-of-his class scholar who was a die-hard Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. He was also manipulative, difficult and self-destructive. Many of the kids can relate.
“I loved my brother, I loved who he was, but I hated who he was when he was using,” says Harris, who has volunteered for 15 years.
Some days, Harris tells the campers, she still wakes up angry. She’s come to realize the lump in her throat that forms when she tells her story is the love she wasn’t able to give to him.
Storytelling happens throughout the weekend on a more intimate scale in age-specific support groups called healing circles. There are four healing circles at this camp, each led by a facilitator with clinical experience. Every camper is also paired with a “Big Buddy” volunteer, who joins their circle and is by their side throughout the weekend.
“This relationship, it’s the magic ingredient,” says volunteer Wally Brown, whose 8-year-old little buddy Miles lost his sister to overdose. “We had the same connection. He lost his sister, and I also lost mine.”
Throughout the weekend, campers also participate in high-energy activities like ropes courses and team challenges designed to build trust and resilience. In the younger groups, kids brainstorm a coping skill for each letter of the alphabet and write down healthy ways to care for themselves: talking with a friend, listening to music, journaling.
Some of the kids open up at unexpected moments: during a sandy game of beach volleyball or while eating ice cream sandwiches in the noisy dining hall.
“Grief is like a big hand right in your face, and every time you share your story, or you hear someone else’s story, the hand moves further and further from your face,” Collopy says.
‘They made bad choices, but they loved us’
Some kids’ only memories of their loved ones are the bad ones — finding heroin needles in the bathroom, discovering the empty orange pill bottles, being asked for cash.
But the photo books many pass around the room when it’s their turn to share tell a different story — laughter at Disney World, splashing through waves at the beach, playing in the park.
“People have this image of what an addict looks like, and for us, an addict looks like our sister, our brother, our mom, our dad,” Talbot says. “They made bad choices, but they loved us.”
Feelings of anger, guilt, regret or even relief are normal with overdose loss, and part of the camp’s goal is to teach the kids it’s OK to feel conflicting emotions about the people they lost.
They’ll carry the hard feelings — and the good things that remind them of their family members, too: Watching “Chicago Fire.” Rooting for the New England Patriots. Wearing a vintage New York Giants jacket. Listening to DMX.
When a camper in the high school-aged healing circle says he feels guilty bringing up his dad because it makes his mom cry, Harris interjects: “It’s not you making them sad, it’s the grief they experienced.”
Growing up in the shadow of the opioid crisis
Many of these kids are the teens of parents who fell victim to the prescription opioid boom in the 1990s and early 2000s. More than 321,000 children in the U.S. lost a parent to 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 U.S., with nearly 70% of deaths caused by synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl.
Some of the campers are older now than the age their parents were when they started using. In high school, many of them are navigating how to handle being confronted with the same substances that tempted their parents.
“I have friends who are doing drugs, and I don’t know how to feel about it,” says Haufler, who is 15. She lost her dad, Kevin, when she was 9, but didn’t find out it was to overdose until more than two years later. She brought with her this weekend photos of them mid-laughter, sticking out their tongues. “You see the possibilities of what could happen, and it just hurts.”
“I don’t want to lose them, too,” she adds.
In some ways, teens today are encountering a more enticing and dangerous system than the generations that came before them, one where counterfeit Oxycodone, Xanax, Percocet and Adderall are accessible on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Telegram. As many as 6 out of every 10 fake prescription pills contain a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which led the “One Pill Can Kill” campaign.
The camp wants to help teens navigate this landscape, and their grief, with tools that can guide them in the real world.
“It’s only three days, and it’s three days on purpose, because we’re setting them up to leave the whole time,” Collopy says.
Come Sunday afternoon, bellies full of hotdogs and hamburgers, the campers exchange hugs and phone numbers. They’re dreading the train ride home to their respective states, schoolwork and going back to being the only kid in their class who lost someone to overdose.
Their grief doesn’t end at camp, but now they know how to carry it.
Rachel Hale’s role covering Youth Mental Health at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach her at rhale@usatoday.com and @rachelleighhale on X.