When children struggle with loss of a loved one, Spokane’s Lion’s Heart steps in
Katrina Doty heard about Lion’s Heart because her children’s therapist gave her a flyer, suggesting she check them out. Doty’s husband died in a car accident in 2023, and her three sons, ages 7, 8 and 10, were struggling with their grief. Lion’s Heart was then a new organization established to provide grief support for children, founded by president Krista Reeder and clinical committee member Maggie Rowe, who noticed the need while working in pediatric oncology at Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital.
“We would build these amazing relationships with families over time, and if a child died, then we would just watch them walk out the door, and we knew there wasn’t much in terms of grief support for children in Spokane,” Reeder said.
When Reeder and Rowe started looking into models of grief support for children, they realized Tri-Cities and Lewiston both had programs to offer that support.
“We expected Seattle and Portland, but we didn’t expect established programs that have been around for 30 years so close to home, but not in Spokane,” Rowe said.
In fall 2022, they established their board, and in August 2023, they established the nonprofit. Lion’s Heart hosts grief day camps for families, community events such as attending a baseball game, and connects families with grief counselors.
Doty’s family attended in November. At first, she was hesitant, but her intake with Reeder assuaged her trepidation.
“I appreciated that, because it allowed me to be able to tell her … there was a lot of trauma leading up to my stuff, and so it wasn’t just a death, there was trauma before that, and then it was compounded by his death,” Doty said. “And so I told her that I was nervous to participate in this kind of thing because I didn’t know if it was going to be like all these people that only have … Everything was wonderful, until one day their lives were shattered.”
Instead, Doty found that most of the people in the day camp had a situation much closer to her family’s, and found the camp extremely beneficial for her boys.
“It gave my boys another perspective of the way they looked at a bad situation, feeling like they were the only ones and our little small circle, it was they felt very much like they were the only ones,” Doty said. “And they would ask me a lot like, ‘Why us? Why did we have to lose our dad? And why does so and so their friend get to have the dad that they do, and why did they get to have this family that looks so perfect, and then this is what we get.’ And those questions were really hard for me to try to answer because I was feeling that way myself.”
Lion’s Heart is opening registration for its November day camp. Reeder said it is important to keep in mind that grief counseling and grieving looks different for children than it does for adults.
“The younger the child, the less they have the capacity to just do talk therapy,” Reeder said. “And so therapeutic services need to focus on play and creativity and allowing the child to work through and identify what’s going on for them, and then it requires counselors that are comfortable with children and who have extra training or experience with children so that they can really meet kids where they’re at.”
Right now, Lion’s Heart is in a period of growth, said Reeder and Rowe. They would like to be able to offer more programming and services for families, but need more funding, volunteers, and board members as they build their community.
“It’s not counseling,” Reeder explained. “It is really peer support that’s facilitated by our volunteers or counselors. So, what you’re doing is creating really a container, and it’s really scary to come for the first time for families, and so once you’ve created that container that has some ritual to it, that helps everybody to feel like when I come this is what’s going to happen.
“And it’s going to be different every time, but it’s going to be book ended by certain things. And so I think that the biggest value of having that mix of new grievers and older grievers.”