"The phone call was hard," Rhonda Johnson recalls. The mother of Drew, 11, and Nick, 9, was coping with the abrupt death of her father, Ronald Schmiedel, on April 10, 2007.
"I wasn't ready to talk about it. But when I called the Highmark Caring Place, Cindy Garfinkel, the family services coordinator, made it easy," Johnson said. "When I broke down and cried she waited until I was able to talk. She let me take my time. It was comforting and very helpful."
Since 1997, the Highmark Caring Place, A Center for Grieving Children, Adolescents and Their Families, has served more than 30,000 family members and community partners at its facilities in Lemoyne, Pittsburgh and Erie. A fourth location, in Warrendale, is opening this spring.
"One out of every 20 kids will have a parent die before he or she is out of high school," the Highmark Caring Place's Garfinkel says. "When you're one of those kids, you feel that no one understands. You need peer support."
Left to right are Drew Johnson, Nick Johnson, Rhonda Johnson and Linda Schmiedel, who lost grandfather, father and husband Ronald Schmiedel in 2007. The Johnsons turned to the Highmark Caring Place for grief support and healing.
"My father's death was very unexpected," Johnson recalls. "The boys spent a lot of time with him, fishing, doing arts and crafts and sleeping over."
Drew, quiet and reserved, didn't want to talk about his grandpa's death. Nick, more outgoing, was the opposite. Confused and concerned by the different reactions, and grieving herself, Johnson brought her sons to the Highmark Caring Place that September "to see if they were normal," she recalls.
Nick liked the dinners and the air hockey; Drew, the arts and crafts. "I learned that it's okay to express your feelings," Drew says. "It's okay to miss someone and cry."
For the Johnsons, the Highmark Caring Place has been so beneficial they've continued on for additional support following their initial 10-meeting session.
"The kids have made friends here with other kids their age who went through what they had," Johnson says. "And I like the feeling we get when we come here. Somebody cares about how we're doing. We get that every time we walk through the door."
Learn how to help a grieving child cope with loss by reading our Grieving pages.
Learn more about the Highmark Caring Place.
This story was originally published in an April 5, 2009, advertising supplement for Highmark Healthy High 5.