Olympia nonprofit Wild Grief helps grieving teens with time spent outdoors

Nature can heal.

That’s the idea behind Wild Grief, an Olympia nonprofit that supports grieving young adults and families through group hikes and backpacking trips and, during COVID-19, through online support groups plus time spent outdoors.

The organization, staffed by volunteers except for a single part-time paid position, is holding a virtual campfire Friday to share its work with the community.

“The wilderness just accepts you where you are,” said Jim Cubbage of Olympia, who started the program in 2015.

His mother passed away when he was 10, but it took him years to come to terms with his grief — and to realize the powerful impact of wild places.

“I experienced it, but I didn’t recognize it,” he told The Olympian. “It finally came to me when I was a wildlife biologist working in Alaska, because I got no grief support. I was a pretty troubled teen and young adult. For 10 years or so, a lot was going on that I didn’t understand.”

For years, Cubbage volunteered with programs for grieving youths, and inspiration arrived while he was working at Camp Erin in Tacoma.

“I saw how well the teens and the kids were doing in supporting each other outside,” he said. “It wasn’t in the wild — it’s held at a YMCA camp — but they were outside of the usual context of sitting in a room in chairs. They were having fun together.

“It came to me, ‘Why don’t we merge wilderness trips and grief support?’ ”

The result was Wild Grief, which began offering backpacking trips and hikes in 2018 and has since helped about 100 young people from as far south as Portland and as far north as Snohomish County. The online programs that started during the pandemic have drawn participants from as far away as Pennsylvania.

In a video on the program’s website, hikers talk about the fun they had as well as the losses they have in common.

“Going backpacking helped me come out of a funk,” said Jessica Neal, who hiked with Wild Grief two years ago while she was a student at Timberline High School in Lacey. “It refreshed me emotionally to be with other people who understood, going through it together and talking about it openly.”

The program had so much impact on Neal, now a sophomore at Western Washington University in Bellingham, that she’s now on the Wild Grief board. One of her main roles is to field questions from others considering whether to participate.

“Wild Grief is amazing,” she told The Olympian. “The people in it are phenomenal people.”

A key part of the program is to help young people realize that they’re not alone and that grief is a part of life.

“We don’t view it as any kind of malady,” Cubbage said. “Grief is natural. Grief is normal. Grief is what we do as humans because we love. It’s the other side of love.”

Sharing Stories: Wild Grief Campfire

• What: The Olympia nonprofit is hosting an evening of stories to spread the world about how it supports grieving teen-agers, young adults and families with backpacking trips and hikes — and during the pandemic with physically distanced support groups combined with time in nature.
• When: 6:30-7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13
• Where: Online
• How much: Free, with registration needed and donations to the nonprofit’s Give Local campaign appreciated
• More information: https://wildgrief.org/events/wild-grief-campfire

This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 5:45 AM.