Tonight is “free choice night.” Well, not entirely free. My campers have four choices of activity; they are “free” to choose within those parameters. Karaoke, Board Games, Spa, and Improv. Rachel, one of my fellow bunk counselors, and I walk side by side into the auditorium for our evening festivities – our eight teen girl campers revved up and ready to disperse.
“Who’s gonna karaaaoookeee with me?!” belts 15-year-old Jazmin. I notice she’s wearing her fleece Betty Boop pajama pants for the umpteenth night in a row, and I suddenly remember the fleece pink pajama pants of my own teenhood and smile to myself.
We walk through double doors and are greeted by the cheers and giggles of 70+ campers bouncing off the building’s wooden walls and tall, airy ceilings. As a counselor, I have been assigned to chaperone one activity with a few other co-counselors. I try not to grimace too obviously as Rachel runs her finger along a paper taped to the wall and says, “Looks like you’re in improv, Carlyn!”
It’s all about the improv
“Yaaayyy!” I force myself to utter. “Who wants to go improv with me?” My campers look at me as though I’m crazy, but are kind enough not to reject me right out. Instead they grab one another’s hands and pull each other towards manicures and karaoke mics.
I still love my bunk even if they wouldn’t do improv with me (seen here with peace fingers in the upper-back left row).
Improv has been relegated to the basement in a small, windowless fluorescent-lit room. A circle of fifteen or so red plastic chairs take up the majority of the space. My campers are there along with the “littles,” the eight-year-old campers who are the youngest here.
Is anybody going to be willing to play?
Two minutes later, a little yells with glee, “Let’s go to the moon!” Suddenly we’re astronauts in a gravity-less world.
“Let’s go to school!” another shouts. We get in our cars and toss our backpacks over our shoulders.
It is August of 2024. I am 37. I am at grief camp. I can’t stop laughing.
Joy + grief go hand in hand
There is, I have come to learn, so much joy in grief.
I have since learned that what I experienced is the theory of “dual-process grief”, introduced by researchers Margaret Stoebe and Henk Schut in 1999. It posits: to live healthily with grief, one has to zig-zag between two ways of being: a loss-oriented one in which the grief intrudes and we cope through facing it head-on, and a restoration-oriented one in which we are more focused on those things that distract us and bring us growth and joy.
While volunteering at Experience Camps in Maryland, I witnessed the dual-process theory play out over and over. One minute I would be sitting with my bunk as part of a “sharing circle,” listening to the vulnerable – sometimes deeply tragic – stories of both the teens and my fellow bunk counselors, as we exchanged mementos about the person(s) in our lives who died. The next minute we’d be screaming and laughing exhilaratingly on an inflatable banana while being raced across the Chesapeake Bay by motorboat.
At camp, we are crying one moment and laughing over bad aim in archery the next.
That’s the beauty of Experience Camps.
My parents are both still alive. My siblings, too. I went to camp expecting to hold space for others’ grief, not my own. But my emotions, too, unexpectedly oscillated over the course of the week. Grief of all kinds rose to the surface: the death of my dear friend Wiley who died by suicide ten years ago, saying goodbye to a loving but unfit relationship, my grandmother’s death the year before. I cried–alone and with my bunk. I wrote bad poetry and journaled during my off periods. I danced in synchronicity to “Cupid Shuffle” with teenage Gen Z-ers. I laughed to the point of tears during an evening of improv.
I left camp feeling a deep sense of gratitude and a very special kind of joy – one that I can only explain as a slow unearthing of my core humanity and truer realization that all the feelings belong.
Carlyn Sylvester is a volunteer at the Experience Camps program in Maryland. She has spent most of her career leading and building zero-to-one teams and initiatives at consumer and content-driven brands like Spotify, Glossier, YouTube, and most recently Netflix. She is currently advising and consulting…and working on a new venture of her own! She finds inspiration in the little things in life: hygge, hot dogs, reality TV, national parks, her library card, and fly fishing. She received her BA from Stanford and her MBA from Harvard Business School. Carlyn currently lives in Los Angeles with her bunny Bubs.
