Seeking Solace
WARRENDALE, Allegheny County — After losing their 5-day-old son, Gabriel, to Trisomy 13, a syndrome caused by a chromosomal abnormality, Scott and Jennifer Davis thought their then 4-year-old daughter, Nova, was acting differently.
Before her brother's death, Scott Davis said Nova was “sweet and accommodating.” Later she was prone to gritting her teeth and shaking her hands, he said. She would punch pillows and cry more often.
Both parents noticed the difference and started to look into finding Nova some type of children's grief support.
Jennifer Davis found the Highmark Caring Place through a friend who worked at a funeral home and told her about the specific support for children and families in four locations in Western Pennsylvania. The family, coming from Millvale, chose to go to the Warrendale location at 200 Warrendale Village Drive.
The Caring Place allows children, up to age 18, and their families a safe place to talk about their grief through peer support with other families who have lost a loved one. Families are invited to spend 10 sessions at center every other week for 20 weeks for two hours a night getting to know each other and sharing their stories.
Nova, now 10, did very well right away, hitting it off with a child her age.
“We started talking session after session,” Nova said. “We both didn't really notice that we were talking about the people that we lost, but we felt comfortable around each other. We shared a lot of secrets that we never really shared. We both figured out our anger.
“We also did a lot of activities, which also got me to share and then caused some relief.”
Jennifer said her first day at the Caring Place wasn't as easy.
“I had a panic attack in the car because I thought, 'I don't want to be here and I can't believe I have to be here.' But it was more because of the reason why I was here. I didn't want to talk to anybody or see anybody. But I knew we had to come for Nova.”
For several weeks, Jennifer said she listened to other people's stories of grief and on the night when she finally shared her story, she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“Nobody in my family had ever lost a child. None of my friends had ever lost a child. I felt absolutely alone, and nobody would ever understand me,” she said. “Coming here, I knew that other people would know exactly what I'm feeling.”
Jennifer said she and the family soon looked forward to going to the Caring Place to talk about her grief. She felt it gave her the comfort she had sought.
“I always say that this is our second family. That's how I feel about this place,” she said. “After awhile, I would look forward to coming here. It was every other week and the week we weren't coming, I would feel like, 'Why can't this be every week?'”Jennifer remembered once Nova went to school, she admitted that she loved going to the Caring Place because Nova knew it was a place where she could cry.“She would say, 'I love coming here, mom, because there are times when I'm at school that I want to cry, but I don't because I know I'll be made fun of. I can cry here because everybody knows how I feel,'” Jennifer said.Scott said he buried his grief under his studies for his master's degree and making a living for his family.“I didn't even realize that I'd done it, but I'd used that as a way to wall myself off from everybody so that I didn't really have to worry about anybody,” he said. “I'd bury myself in my studies and worry about income, and coming here got me to start talking about it, which is something I hadn't done.”Although the Davises said they went to the Caring Place to help Nova, they found it helped them, too.“Coming here, I thought it was strictly to help Nova,” Scott said. “So the rest of it was something I wasn't anticipating.”Jennifer said, “Which in turn, helped us to help her. She was always my first priority. So coming here and helping me deal with it made me better for her.”John Mitchell of Zelienople and his then 6-year-old daughter, Emely, also felt uneasy about their first visit to the Caring Place.It was four months after John's wife and Emely's mother, Kate, had died only 54 days after being diagnosed with an advanced stage of acute myeloid leukemia.In the months afterward, with the exception of Emely attending school, the Mitchells became recluses.“We went into a complete shell. We didn't talk to anybody. I didn't leave the house. I would wait for Emely to come home from school. Then we would just sit there and talk about momma. We'd talk about what happened and why it happened,” John said.He said he found it interesting while he was trying to make Emely feel more at ease, he also was questioning the same issues about dying and death.“As an adult you're trying to explain it to your child, and you have all the same questions that your child does,” he said. “She was questioning God and she was questioning everything. I was too, but I didn't feel comfortable telling her that.”John said he started to research grief support when he realized their new lifestyle could be detrimental.“We did that for about four months. We would see family periodically, but not a whole lot. I started thinking that this isn't healthy. It was almost scary the place we were at,” he said.On their first visit to the Caring Place, John said he questioned whether they could talk about Kate's death with other people.“When we walked through that door, I thought, how are we going to do this? How are we going to walk into a place with people we've never met and begin talking about the most personal and tragic event of our lives? I was really skeptical,” he said.“We both realized pretty quick that as we looked around, everybody here feels the same way we do,” he said. “It isn't like talking to people who say, 'It's OK, you'll get over it.' It's real people with real grief.”Like the Davises, John said it got easier to go to the Caring Place as time passed, He and Emely soon looked forward to going. And although he was there for Emely, John said he too found solace in sharing with the other adults.“When you leave the Caring Place, you go home and do a lot of reflection. It causes you to think about what happened and how you handled it because you heard how other people were able to cope,” he said.“It was this very interesting and unusual peer group that I found myself in. I was totally at ease with them. I couldn't believe what I was sharing with them. But I realized that that's the magic of the Caring Place.”Emely, now 9, said the it was where she found she could open up and talk about her grief.“It felt more comfortable coming here because all of the kids that come here have lost someone,” she said.She enjoyed working on the arts and crafts projects, such as the quilt patch that families design together with mementos and photos of their loved ones.Once completed, the quilt patch is sewn onto a larger quilt along with other families' memory patches. The quilt is hung on the walls along with the other memory quilts.“It really helped because you wouldn't really get to do this anywhere else. It was creative and you wouldn't think to do this at home. You wouldn't think that would help, but it really does,” she said.John said there have been hard times when he and Emely have asked to visit the Caring Place to sit beside the quilt and talk.“We have come here several times when there wasn't any activity here. I called here and said, 'We're having a really terrible day. Can we come down in the morning, go in the hallway, and sit with the quilt and remember things and talk about things?'” he said.“Everything is OK here. You're not breaking any rules. If you need to do that, then the door's open, come on in. It's just such a welcoming place.”
