about

I grew up in Michigan.  I have three brothers and was the only girl.  When I was 9, my mother died in her sleep from a blood clot that traveled to her lungs.

My father went off the deep end. He began staying out late, drinking too much and started sleeping on the couch to avoid the bed my mother had died in. My father turned all parenting responsibilities over to his own parents who had moved in from Arizona. They hired and fired four sets of housekeepers in one year.

My father began dating a woman a year after my mother died and married her three months later. He thought getting a “woman” in the house would solve all the chaos. 

A year into their stormy marriage, my father suffered a massive heart attack and died. It was the day before I started Junior High.  I was 12. My world was completely shattered.

My older brother moved out shortly after my dad died. My other two brothers and I tried to be extra good so we could stay together, keep the same friends, and not have to move in with relatives.

It turned out my father hadn’t changed his will so everything was left to my deceased mother. This set the stage for years of legal battles with my stepmother threatening to send us to live with relatives if she didn’t get more money from our trust funds.

When I was sixteen a judge turned down her request for more money, so I went to live with my dad’s sister and her husband. My aunt wanted me, my uncle did not. I lived in my bedroom until I went away to college. 

At college (Michigan State), I was keenly aware that I had no home to go back to. I was completely on my own and felt a lot of pressure to make sure I could support myself. It was lonely and not a very carefree time.

Before graduating, I decided to be a camp counselor and met my future husband, Kelly, at that summer camp. We shared a real love for kids and for camp and went back for three summers.

In 1994, I read a book called Motherless Daughters about women and girls whose mothers died at a young age. It spoke to the huge hole inside of me. In 1995 I wrote the author, telling her of my personal loss as well as my professional background of running non profits, and suggested starting a national Motherless Daughters organization. We did.

Then, at a Motherless Daughters luncheon I met a 70-year-old woman named Barbara who had lost her mother at age 10 and had never met another person who had lost their mother as a child. I had an “a-ha” moment.  

I realized, I needed to catch kids at the beginning of their grief journey, have them meet other kids who have also experienced a significant death and let them know they are not alone, instead of waiting 10, 20 or even 60 years—like Barbara. I combined this with the dream Kelly and I had to start a camp of our own, and in that moment Comfort Zone Camp, a bereavement camp for children, was born.

Comfort Zone has become the largest bereavement camp in the country, and has grown in ways I never dreamed possible. It has been an incredible journey and it is not over yet. Helping make other kids' grief journeys easier than my own has been incredibly powerful and very humbling. To see campers turn into volunteers and pay forward what has been given to them has been an amazing outcome that I never dreamed of. I look forward to seeing where the next 10 years will take us.