American Spirit

by Taya Kyle

“Don’t just be inspired. Be exceptional,” says Barbara. “Our mission is to provide a meaningful platform that encourages national pride, promotes the American Dream, emphasizes the upshot of giving back, and supports all who honorably serve.”

  The site includes podcasts of interviews and articles that Barbara has done with a variety of people whom she finds inspiring. It’s a wide range—authors and actors, entrepreneurs, disabled veterans—anyone they meet or hear about with a positive message is potentially a subject.

  And then there are the stories like the one of Heather and David Mosher.

  The day David planned to propose they marry, Heather found out she had breast cancer. He went through with the proposal, and she accepted—but their lives were quickly consumed by the ordeal of treatment, surgeries, and chemo. Heather’s condition deteriorated rapidly, but they went ahead with the wedding, even as she was confined to a hospital bed and had to speak her vows through an oxygen mask.

  It was the happiest day of her life, but it was also her last—she succumbed to the disease eighteen hours later.

  The wedding, Heather’s courage, and that of her husband made their love story one of inspirational triumph for those around them.

  “The common theme in our stories is that everyone is giving back in some way,” says Barbara. “We want to reverse the trend of all this negative news. . . . I felt this country was really doomed, because the only things I read were bad.”

  Some of the stories are of people they knew or have met in their travels. Others Barbara contacted out of the blue after hearing about them. The stories—told in podcasts and videos as well as in articles—are little sprinkles of good news in an often dark landscape.

  “Personally, I carry something away from each one I interview,” says Barbara. “I’m hooked on it—what am I going to come away with?” she wonders before each interview.

  Sometimes it’s a little quip. Other times it’s a kind of role modeling that comes through when she asks herself what the person she interviewed would do in a similar situation.

  “We’re still figuring out the dynamics of it all,” she notes. Some of the web stories will get hundreds of shares; others none. They’ve revised the site, updating and reorganizing—everything is a work in progress.

  The stories of inspiration Barbara heard convinced her to do more than simply retell them.

  “It’s great to be inspired and maybe smile for an hour, but inspiration is valueless unless you do something with it,” she says. She’d often been inspired by a speech or a story—only to crash later when she returned to the real world.

  Inspire people and give them tools to do something with that inspiration—that was the way to help them move on.

  “I started trying to encourage groups [helping Gold Star wives and mothers] to put hands-on things into their events,” she says. “Self-defense workshops. That was huge to me, both for the physical aspect and the mind-set. There’s a psychology involved.”

  The psychology is simple: your life is worth fighting for. And the physical activity is practical on many levels.

  But the organizations she spoke to were reluctant to offer those sorts of programs. So, with the help of her friends and boyfriend, she put on her own event.

  With support from the nonprofits Got Your Back and the Committee for the Families of War Veterans, along with help from ShopRite and in-kind donations, Barbara set up a weekend that would provide both inspiration and some practical tools. It was aimed at military families, especially—though not exclusively—widows.

  Military families often face a double loss when a spouse dies. Not only do they lose their loved one, but they also may be hard-pressed to find a support network. Service families move often, which can make friendships tenuous. At the same time, many women with young families have devoted themselves to raising children. Some lack job experience, but many others have simply taken time to put their family first. Until the people hiring see a lapse in employment to manage a home as valuable, these women will continue to face insult and injury as they work to support their family after the loss of a bread-winning spouse.

  Barbara enlisted the help of professionals who volunteered their time to help educate others. She signed up an entrepreneur to talk about starting businesses in practical as well as inspirational terms. She found a martial artist who would give some basic self-defense instruction. She lined up a real estate broker to talk about how to get into that industry and a movement instructor to add some basic physical fitness ideas and practice.

  She held the program in a rented house in a small town not far from where she lives. Ten women were selected—Barbara wanted to make sure people attending were likely to benefit. The mix blended widows with Gold Star moms and a fiancée. One had lost her spouse just three months before. They all shared a common goal of doing something positive with their lives.

  “I was so impressed by how everyone just jumped in and went with it,” she says. Different backgrounds, conditions, they all supported each other. Most slept in a large room, slumber-party style.

  Three of the women have begun serious careers in real estate investing—a bit of a surprise for Barbara, who wasn’t sure what to expect out of the first session.

  “We want to continue doing these events, and learn from each one,” says Barbara, who was planning on a new one for later in 2018 when we talked to her.

  There are limits. Neither Barbara nor her boyfriend plan on starting a full-blown nonprofit; it involves so much work that they fear they would be consumed. They’re looking for a mix of helping others while living their lives for themselves and their own families.

  It’s a good strategy for us all to follow.

  “I know if I had been able to recognize my own strength, that guy would never have gotten past my front door,” she says, looking back on her life since widowhood. But the dark hole of grief robbed her of that strength—just as it has robbed other women in the same position. Her goal now is to help others recognize their strength and give them the tools to stand up for themselves, literally and figuratively.

  Helping Families Recover

  Erin’s House

  The grief when you lose a loved one is almost unbearable. As adults, we struggle to cope. Even with help, the process is long and painful, with many twists and turns. But what about young children? What do they go through when they lose a parent or sibling?

  Not only do they lack adult tools to deal with loss, depending on their age they may not even understand the most basic aspects of what they are going through. Aside from sheer anger or outright despair, most will lack the ability to articulate what they feel. We may call them “resilient,” but often that’s a function of our own ignorance about their grief and how they process or hide it.

  Until very recently, programs devoted specifically to helping very young children get over the loss of a parent or sibling or other close family member were nonexistent. That was certainly the case in 1987, when five-year-old Erin Farragh died. Her death touched the Fort Wayne, Indiana, community deeply, but perhaps no one felt the loss as painfully as her younger siblings.

  A family friend, Tracie Martin, and a group of women from the Junior League realized how difficult a time the children had had. That experience inspired them to help other families by starting a program specifically aimed at helping children grieve in a group setting. They named it Erin’s House, in honor of the little girl who died.

  It was a unique idea at the time—there were maybe a few dozen centers devoted to grieving children in the country. Today, there are ten times that—though helping children outside of traditional one-on-one and family counseling settings is still somewhat rare. There is still a misperception that very young children, especially if they are not yet school-age, don’t really grieve.

  That is not true.

  “You go to the funeral, and little Johnny is sitting in the corner with a coloring book,” says Erin’s House executive director Debbie Meyer. “People say, oh, they’ll
be all right; they’re too young to know what is going on. But those little ears hear everything. They know exactly what is going on.”

  Kids are amazingly perceptive, and while they can be very resilient, they are always affected by tragedy. Even when parents attempt to keep information from them—which is often the case when someone dies because of a homicide or suicide—the children generally know exactly what happened. Being able to express their feelings, however, can be extremely difficult, even though that is often a necessary step to dealing with grief and preventing it from crippling their own lives.

  “Kids deserve the truth,” says Debbie. “Unresolved grief can result in all kinds of things,” from truancy to far worse.

  Erin’s House exists to try to head off those problems.

  Some grief centers are faith-based. Others are primarily places for one-on-one counseling. Erin’s House works with peer-based programs, which is to say that groups of children gather with trained counselors and talk about how they feel, what happened to their loved ones, and in many cases just about normal kid stuff.

  There are tearful moments, and even precious ones. Like this one, from not too long ago:

  In the room for three-to-six-year-olds, the kids gathered around the table in a circle and took turns introducing themselves and speaking. (Taking turns is encouraged by a device called a talking stick. It’s a great idea, dating back to some North American Indian tribes. Basically, there is one stick, which is held by the person talking. He or she can speak as long as they want; the stick is then passed on or returned to the center of the circle, where the next person can take it. It’s an easy way of reinforcing the idea of “one person at a time” for children without getting cranky about it.)

  This was Tommy’s first visit, and he spoke first, introducing himself. (Tommy is not his real name; we’ve changed it for privacy’s sake.)

  “I’m Tommy,” he said. “My dad died.”

  He passed the stick to the girl next to him, who said her mother died. And so on around the room.

  “Why are you people all copying me?” Tommy burst out as the stick came back to him.

  The facilitator patiently explained that they weren’t—everyone in the room had lost someone close to them. Tommy was stunned—he literally didn’t know that other children also experienced loss.

  That made sense to him. No one in his class at school had lost their mother or father. When he sat in the school cafeteria for lunch, none of his friends at the table had lost a parent or anyone close to them. Worse, for the most part, they’d stopped talking to him—not because they didn’t like him but because they simply didn’t know what to say. A lot of the adults in his life were the same way.

  Now he was in a room with other kids—and two adult facilitators—who had gone through many of the same things he had.

  Did this instantly cure his grief? Of course not. Did it make it easier to bear? We can only guess at that—but obviously something positive was going on, because after the session he told his mom that he wanted to go back. I know from Chris’s and my own experience that there is tremendous value in simply knowing you aren’t alone. I had no idea how big that is until I experienced it myself.

  While we often think of home as a “safe place,” for grieving children, it can be a place full of land mines, at least when it comes to talking about loss. If Dad cries when they start talking about missing Mom, they may feel they shouldn’t talk about her at all. The grieving center becomes a safe place to express those feelings—and a place where they can learn that they’re not really hurting their dad.

  Children’s grief can take different and unusual forms. Children in some of the groups have spoken about having lost a pet goldfish—but in reality, there was no goldfish; he or she was talking about losing a loved one in a way that was easier or safer for them to express.

  Besides the group rooms, there are special rooms for different moods or activities: a quiet room, with stars on its ceiling where children can remember their loved ones; a volcano room, where a kid can explode in anger if he or she feels the need. There’s even a hospital room, which is designed to look exactly like a hospital with a bed and medical equipment. Kids get to play at being a doctor or patient, making the sometimes-scary things one finds in a hospital not quite so scary.

  At the end of each session, everyone joins together for what is called a hand squeeze—a giant circle where everyone physically reassures each other that someone cares.

  The program isn’t just for preschool and elementary-age kids. Teenagers can feel loss very deeply, even if it occurred several years before. It’s often the little things, or seemingly little things, that can provoke the most hurt. A girl getting ready for the prom without her mom to help her pick out a dress, a boy learning to drive without Dad to share advice—those moments can sting worst of all after the initial shock and recovery periods.

  “This is a way for the kids to talk and share memories,” says Debbie.

  Friendships often start at Erin’s House, and there’s even been one marriage between children who went through the program.

  Aside from weekly programs, the group runs three weekend camps throughout the year, kind of mini-vacations where families can make connections with others who have had similar experiences.

  There is also an adult group for parents, aimed at sharing tools for dealing with the “new normal.” Counselors also provide phone assistance during the day. Besides six full-timers and four part-time employees who have degrees in the field, there is an army of volunteers trained as facilitators for the programs. Most of the volunteers have experienced profound grief themselves. One caveat: while they go through an extensive training program, they do not provide counseling themselves.

  Erin’s House staffers present assemblies for schools at no charge. Sometimes these are prompted by tragedies—a car accident claiming the lives of high school students, for example.

  “Part of it is explaining to the kids that they can still play and have fun,” says Debbie. Sometimes we need to be reminded that it’s not disrespectful to go on living while still remembering the dead.

  It’s also important to explain that there are many ways of expressing grief—some people cry; some don’t. Some react immediately; others take a long time. Some deaths might be a trigger point for grief about other losses, multiplying the hurt and complicating the recovery.

  “All of these feelings are normal,” says Debbie. That’s the most important message.

  The programs cater to the school’s needs. Some simply want to get back to normal as quickly as possible. In other cases, the counselors are available after presentations to talk in-depth with anyone who feels the need.

  Besides traditional counseling methods, staff members employ strategies like grief activities—say, crafting simple items such as bracelets or key chains to commemorate the loss of friends. And then there are the marshmallow shooters—kids literally shooting marshmallows back and forth, sharing laughs as they talk about how much their friend used to like to do the same.

  “It’s a way for them to share memories and talk about it,” says Debbie. “Sometimes it’s hard to talk about, especially at home.”

  One of the things that impressed me about the building was that it felt very much like a home, not a counseling center. There’s pizza in the kitchen and fun and games out back.

  I’ve learned that there’s so much power in knowing that you’re not alone in your grief. Erin’s House does that in a very organic way, trying many different approaches for the many different people. When you don’t have a specific solution for a problem, you can become the solution for the problem—I felt that when I walked through the door.

  I know true healing comes from different avenues. Every room seemed to hold a different path toward healing—the room where you could throw things, the room where you could meditate. The room for crafts, where creativity helps foster solace. And then the room where kids learn that grief doesn’t have to stop you from playing
and having a good time.

  By helping someone else you can help yourself at the same time. It was so impressive to find that many of the people helping others there had been through grief themselves. No map can show you which road to take to heal yourself, but traveling and sharing your choices with others can help you find peace.

  When I visited, the kids and staff let me join in a simple ceremony releasing balloons in memory of their loved ones. It took me back to the day we did that for Chris. It’s a small yet meaningful gesture, a way of remembering yet letting go at the same time. I couldn’t help but think of all the good things these young people will accomplish, thanks to the efforts of their parents, staff, and peers.

  At Erin’s House, there really is no time limit on how long kids can come. The end comes when they themselves decide to move on.

  Baseball practice is more important?

  Great. That means the program has been successful.

  If there’s a trigger point down the line, the kids are welcome back. Most don’t, except perhaps to visit. Generally, kids average two visits a month. They stay between eighteen and twenty-four months on average, though certain kinds of deaths seem to take much longer to process. Children who have lost parents in homicides, which generally involve trials and many other events that provoke memories, may stay for three or four years.

  Four families and the basement of a church—that’s where the program started. Now there’s a fourteen-thousand-square-foot building that the organization owns outright, with 660 families helped a year. Families are never charged for the services; all the money for the $800,000 annual budget comes from donations, grants, and fund-raisers. One of them is an annual Common Bond breakfast, where I was honored to be invited as a guest speaker.

  “When the kids are first walking up to Erin’s House, they’re very timid and hanging on to Mom,” says Debbie. “When they’re done that first night, they don’t want to leave.”

  Debbie’s involvement with Erin’s House came about through a series of coincidences—lucky ones, we’d say. She was working as a marketing executive with a local firm and considering relocating when another executive who was on the Erin’s House board insisted she interview for the job as executive director. Though very reluctant, she went to see the programs and immediately fell in love with the kids they help. Since taking the job, she’s managed to move the organization from a mall storefront to its own $2.7 million facility.