My Weekend at Sad Camp
For most of my adult life, my mother and I were estranged. She was difficult, prone to anger and silence, often refusing visits and declining to answer the phone for weeks or months. Twenty years ago, when I offered to introduce her to my husband, she replied with a one-word email: NO. The last time I saw her was in May of 2022. My sister and I—she in Paris, me in Berlin—had spent a week trying to reach her. Finally, we hopped on a train to the small town in France where she lived to make sure she was okay. The visit was suffocating and tense; her house, even her town, felt small and diminished, as if the confinement of the pandemic had made me into a giant.
She died in March of 2023, and I felt both angry and numb. It was just like her to leave all of a sudden. There would be no holding hands, no final peace. Thankfully my siblings and I had each other, four of us gathered to deal with the funeral and the house, since she’d left no instructions.
When I returned home to Edmonton, where I’ve lived for the past 15 years, I threw myself into work, my usual coping mechanism. I’m a professor of literature at the University of Alberta, and I made myself busier than ever, even as I complained that I wasn’t allowed to pause and grieve. In truth, I didn’t know how to fit the enormity of the loss, with so much unsolved, into the normal frame of reality. My mother and I had spent years with almost no contact—but she was still a number I could reach, a doorbell I could ring. Now her absence was complete.
The irony was that my work involves thinking about grief. At the time I was about to publish a new book about mourning memoirs, yet I felt poorly equipped to deal with loss firsthand. I worried that I wasn’t feeling anything, and I craved being taken care of. I wanted someone to make me soup.
In June of 2023, I received a newsletter advertising a “conscious grieving retreat” to be held in September in a small northern California town called Mill Valley. It felt fated: my husband and I had stayed in the very same town the previous summer, and the newsletter included a testimonial from another Albertan. I figured it would be a pause—and it would be relevant to my work, a chance to get an up-close look at what’s known as an “offering” in the burgeoning grief and end-of-life industry.
Northern California’s culture of health and wellness, alongside the entrepreneurial influence of Silicon Valley, have made it a hub for this growing market niche: a loose constellation of start-ups, entrepreneurs, therapists, death doulas, artists and design firms aiming to grapple with death in ways that are more productive—and more profitable. Its offerings run from the prosaic (coaching, legal advice) to the mystical (experimental medicines, spirituality, curated rituals). I was introduced to it in 2018 at a festival called Reimagine End of Life, hosted by a Bay Area design firm called Ideo. Its chief creative officer, Paul Bennett, had lost his father years before, which sparked his thinking about the looming wave of mortality among baby boomers and their parents, and how the end-of-life industry was poised to boom.
The idea behind the Mill Valley retreat—a dedicated space to grieve with strangers—isn’t entirely novel. Grief camps for youth are relatively common: Camp Erin has locations in the U.S. and Ontario, Nova Scotia has Brigadoon Village and in British Columbia there is Camp Kerry (which was so overbooked last year it turned away as many kids as it accepted). But the California retreat was different, conceived for adults by Claire Bidwell Smith, a therapist who has become a major figure in the new business of mourning. When she was 14 years old, both her parents were diagnosed with cancer; her mother died when she was 18, her father when she was 25. She has since authored books, hosted podcasts, given lectures and posted about grief to her 33,000 Instagram followers.
She believes that the way our society manages grief is fundamentally broken. In the West, most of us mourn alone, strictly with those closest to us or not at all, burying our uncomfortable feelings. We treat grief as private and taboo and respond to it with silence—which she would say is the opposite of what we need. Death is a massive life upheaval that completely reorganizes our reality. It requires not silence, but witness. That’s what the retreat was all about.
Upon landing at San Francisco airport in September, I met two fellow participants to share the 50-minute cab ride to Mill Valley. One of them was the most upbeat bereaved person I’ve ever met—she instantly coined our destination “Sad Camp.” The other was the only man in attendance. When we entered the Ralston White Retreat, up a hill among the redwoods, the afternoon was all California golden light, slanted across the spacious rooms. It was beautiful, but at check-in, everyone was tense and unsure: averted eyes, scared faces, cold smiles, people who seemed to have shrivelled on the way here, suddenly uncertain if this was a good idea. Some made secret pledges to leave if it got too hard.
There was a famous athlete and a stay-at-home mom; there was a lawyer and a nurse; there was a writer and a clinical counsellor. A TV journalist whose loss dated back 25 years was there to understand “the long arc of grief.” Every kind of loss was represented: mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, friends, young children and adult children. Some had died suddenly or ambiguously, by suicide, murder, illness or drowning. Some last year and some decades ago. Most participants were white, middle-aged women, though a few were younger, and of different backgrounds. It was easy to spot the grieving mothers, their bodies tense, their eyes swollen even after years. The guilt had become part of their motherhood, though they were no less mothers than before; fiercer even, having carried their children through death.
That evening, at the first sharing circle, Claire asked us for one word to describe how we felt. “Anxious” was the most frequent; also “nervous” and “angry.” I said “oppressed,” as if grief was another demand that I couldn’t fit into my schedule. It was a lot to take in, but by the second circle, the next morning, the general sentiment had shifted: this felt harder than we thought, but it was easier than what we’d been going through alone.
From there the rhythm was set: large gatherings alternating with smaller group sessions, on mother, father, spouse and child loss respectively. There were writing sessions with prompts to journal about grief, and suggestions for rituals to memorialize our person. There were movement-oriented sessions, including tapping, a technique to reduce anxiety, and Saturday morning yoga. At one session the instructor asked us to locate our grief within our body, which immediately produced in me long, deep, relieving tears. There was an overall sense of embodiment—a reminder that loss is felt physically. All the workshops were punctuated by generous meals. In the early mornings, I went for walks in the forest, where it was easy to feel some kind of spiritual connection, embraced by the enormous redwood branches.
But the real luxury was not in the beautiful décor, the scenery, the comforts of the house or the food. What made it truly valuable was the space of acceptance. I hadn’t expected that my main teachers would be 25 strangers, coming in with their own heart-wrenching experiences—a lively, generous, articulate bunch who got it, because they were going through the same thing. It was like AA for the bereaved, and I understood the power of the group. Through their compounding losses, the shared stories demonstrated that grief is not an extreme event, but a net that catches everything already fragile in your life.
On our last evening, we shared picture of our lost ones. I showed everyone the picture my family chose for my mother’s tombstone, one of the few in which she radiates—my mother was unpredictable, but she could also be warm and mischievous, and at times she defended us fiercely against the world. I told a story about how she covered for my best friend and me when we wanted to go out dancing on Saturday nights. Everybody laughed.
The setting was secular, but a strange peace came down with the evening, a bit of magic in the air. Despite their uniqueness, and in some cases their violence, each loss allowed a connection to every other. The circumstances of my mother’s death were ambiguous, and I felt shame at not having been present. Yet I was met with compassion when I told the story, not judgement. My grief wasn’t mirrored—so unique is each loss—but it was reciprocated.
Before going to the retreat, I had thought grief was about time. After, I understood that it’s about space. Those four days created room to share, to let our messiness be seen and the air flow in. You don’t move past it, but through it. It starts with a physical space, then becomes a space you carry within yourself. It was one we all brought home.
The price for the revelation was steep—the retreat cost US$2,400. But as baby boomers age and Canada’s mortality rate rises, I believe there’s a chance for the ideas incubated in these kind of exclusive spaces to be rolled out broadly. Founded in the spring of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the Canadian Grief Alliance—a coalition of more than 150 national and provincial associations—has called for a “national grief strategy” to address what it saw as the next global health emergency. It anticipated the wave of deaths during COVID-19, how feelings of loss would be made more complex by social distancing, and being deprived of grieving rituals. It has now received $1 million dollars in federal funding, and that makes me hopeful that a change is afoot in how we grapple with grief, and that the kind of communal care envisioned by professionals like Claire may grow more prevalent.
More than a year after the retreat, some friendships forged there have remained steadfast. However untimely and enduring the loss, however ill-prepared we were for it, we don’t have to face it alone.
