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local_eater

Summer camp is cancelled

localeater
4 years ago

Sad. My ds has been attending this camp since he was 6. It is a camp for type 1 diabetics; when he was diagnosed at age 3 the doctors all stressed how important it was that he go to a camp for kids with the disease. They were right.

Sending him off for a week that first year was hard. He was so small and so fragile. I remember calling his pump supply company to get some extra supplies for the camp trip and talking to the young man on the phone about why I needed extras. I joked, saying if you say no, it will be my excuse to keep him home. He said, “what camp” I told him and he replied, “that camp, my cabin mates, we are still together, they are my people“

It‘s thirteen years later and that camp is part of our existence. It’s summer, “where’s ds?” he is at camp. He is now or would now be a head counselor. He gets letters and emails, and texts all year long from his campers. They let him know how they are doing, that they are coming back. The older guys have a perpetual group chat. Stuff a young man doesn’t want to talk about with mom, can be discussed there. I guess it’s kind of their GW. Kids feel normal, not different here. They aren’t bullied like many are in their schools.

DS showed me the announcement in the group text one of the guys wrote, “my heart is bleeding”

I know in the grand scheme of things this is small potatoes, but I am sad.

Featured Answer
  • mtnrdredux_gw
    4 years ago
    last modified: 4 years ago

    Don’t wave away frivolous pleasures. Those are also ‘essential’ in hard times.

    By Monica Hesse, WAPO

    Every few days lately, I’ve been opening my Kindle and rereading the same passage from the same book. It’s a Holocaust memoir by Gerda Weissmann Klein, originally published in 1957, called “All But My Life.” In this particular passage, the bulk of Klein’s horrors are over; she’s convalescing in a hospital where she’s caught the eye of an American soldier. He comes almost daily to bring her magazines and flowers, which baffles her ward mates. They are starving. They have nothing. Why doesn’t Klein ask her soldier to bring something useful, like food or clothes?

    Klein tells them she prefers the frivolous gifts. Magazines and flowers make her feel “that I appeared to him as a normal girl, briefly confined to the hospital.”

    This book is on my mind for a couple of reasons. I’d used it for research while writing my own recent novel. I thought I’d be on a book tour this week; instead I’m sitting in my living room. Which is the overriding tagline for many of us now, at least those of us lucky enough not to be sick ourselves, or working on the front lines: Instead, I’m sitting in my living room.

    The cancellations started on a grand scale — no more National Basketball Association, no more summer blockbuster movies — but have now seeped into the personal. The most recent thing to wreck me was a Twitter thread started by the writer Summer Brennan, who is recovering from covid-19 in France. “Please tell me your thing that got cancelled that you are sad about, no matter how small,” she wrote, and what unfolded was a saga of large and tiny lost dreams: family reunions, weddings, tickets to “Hamilton,” scrimped-for over months, now sitting on a dresser.

    The Make-A-Wish Foundation replied that it had to postpone granting 2,000 wishes, from children who had been suffering long before the coronavirus outbreak. A woman lamented the loss of a vacation she and her best friend had been planning for 30 years — ever since the concept of still being best friends at age 50 seemed laughably abstract. A father responded that he was unexpectedly teary over his daughter’s canceled swimming lessons. She’d loved them so much. Now she would put on her bathing suit anyway, “and pretend to swim on the living room carpet.”


    Instead, we are sitting in our living rooms.


    Brennan, the writer who started the cathartic thread, responded with encouragement to every canceled dream. And then, less than 12 hours after the exercise began, she tweeted that she was back in the hospital. “This is a crazy illness.”

    One of the odder sensations of this moment in the pandemic — three or four or five weeks in — is how large our emotions are for how small our days are. The most rudimentary acts take on the most monumental proportions. We are recovering, then we are back in hospitals. We are forgetting anything is amiss as we make coffee or empty the dishwasher, then we are remembering that outside our own walls people are dying, have died, will die. This is terrifying; this is boring; this is normal. Years into the future, when all of this is done, I’m going to bring rolls of toilet paper as host gifts to dinner parties instead of wine or a box of chocolates. Everyone who was alive right now will understand.

    One way to process through it is to think about the cancellations, the things we have lost. That’s the human thing to do. Rereading my piles and piles of World War II memoirs, I’ve lately taken a lot of comfort in the way that even these survivors and heroes, members of the Greatest Generation, thought about the cancellations of events both momentous and small.

    In one of my favorite passages of “Anne Frank Remembered,” written by the woman who brought food to the Frank family in their secret attic annex, Miep Gies is frustrated because she can no longer find real coffee or cigarettes. The most horrible war imaginable rages on outside, and Gies is keeping eight people alive in impossible circumstances, and meanwhile, in her living room, she is thinking of coffee.

    This pandemic is nothing like the unsurpassed horror of the Holocaust, which was the result of targeted human cruelty rather than viral illness. No, the reason those lines resonate is that they acknowledge something we’re all very attuned to at the moment: how our humanity is complicated and delicate, held together by the oddest of things. In the midst of horror, people are brave; in the midst of bravery, people still mourn that they can’t go to hair salons.

    Coffee, cigarettes, fashion magazines, flowers. Canceled swimming lessons, canceled weddings. Each of us sorting through, every day, how to grieve what we’ve lost, and what rituals we can hang onto. Sometimes the dumb canceled swimming lessons bring more tears than the canceled weddings; sometimes the fashion magazines seem more vital than the food.

    The real reason I keep rereading that passage from Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoir is that the passage is really about wrestling with what is important and what is frivolous.

    It’s the appearance of normalcy that we’re really craving. The fantasy that we’re all normal people in normal times, just briefly confined to our living rooms.

    In a canceled life, sustenance can look like bread but it can also look like flowers.

    Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society.

    Comments (20)

    • salonva
      4 years ago

      Sorry. I am guessing this is going to a very different summer. I was thinking, as my kids are long out of school and on their own.... about those who do have special needs. I guess viruses don't discern that either.

      I am sorry for the disappointment...

    • Zalco/bring back Sophie!
      4 years ago
      last modified: 4 years ago

      It is hard watching our children loses something special to them. I am so terribly sorry, localeater.

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    • mtnrdredux_gw
      4 years ago

      No one has to justify or rank their sadness and disappointment here. We can say what we feel here and not be attacked or judged (RIGHT, people? or i kick you in the shins)


      Summer memories as teens stay with us forever. Especially ones with this kind of continuity, these kinds of bonds, and growing leadership. However you or I spend our summer, we can probably make up for it another year. That's not really true with teens, They only have so many summers they will spend on these things, and then their summers are like anyone else's and full of commitments.


      This is why I feel most for this age group. They are suffering real losses. It is sad and it is something you and he are right to grieve. I am glad though that camp has worked out so well for him for many years.

    • jojoco
      4 years ago

      Your poor son. I totally get it. Summer camp meant the world to me. Mine was a laid back super artsy camp in Connecticut and it was my respite from a feeling of not fitting in in high school. It was also the place I met my husband.( it only took us 30+ years to get married though, lol)

      This lost summer is crushing to your son, but I am certain it will be just an asterisk in a lifetime of amazing summer memories and connections.

    • Allison0704
      4 years ago

      So sorry, localeater. It won't replace camp, but maybe they can do Zoom chats for some real time interaction.

    • mtnrdredux_gw
      4 years ago

      I hope people can see this; I know some virus stuff is not behind paywalls. I read the NYT and WAPO on line every day and just now came across this apropos article in WAPO.


      https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dont-wave-away-frivolous-pleasures-those-are-also-essential-in-hard-times/2020/04/10/0eee9cda-7903-11ea-b6ff-597f170df8f8_story.html

    • Allison0704
      4 years ago

      Can you copy/paste the article, Mtn?

    • User
      4 years ago

      I am so sorry. The loss expressed in your words is real and palpable. Although it won't be the same, I so hope that the kids can manage to carve out special virtual experiences while they're forced to remain apart.

    • daisychain01
      4 years ago

      This brought tears to my eyes, localeater. We are still waiting to hear about my DDs camp, but we are not hopeful. She has taken every other cancellation without complaint, but has expressed that if camp doesn't go ahead, she will be devastated. LIke your son, her camp friends are her people.

    • DLM2000-GW
      4 years ago
      last modified: 4 years ago

      It's not small potatoes at all. And not just because its your son or because this is a camp that caters to kids with diabetes. It's one more way all of our lives have been interrupted, disrupted and changed in some ways forever. Many of us grew up with camp experiences that helped shape us and still have those connections. It's part of our identity in some ways. We are all watching a generation of kids as they face a defining time in their lives, our country and the world. We are sad (so are they) but ultimately I think (hope) we will see a stronger generation, committed to change emerge from all this.

      I do like the Zoom idea.

    • nini804
      4 years ago
      last modified: 4 years ago

      Oh, I am so sad for your son, Localeater! 😔 Gosh darn it, these kids are really hurting, and it is terrible to take away something that is still 2 months away that I am sure has been something he was using to give himself something to look forward to...now he probably feels a real loss, not only of camp itself, but the thought of going, if that makes sense.

      Mtn...that article was wonderful and eloquently put into words exactly how this is all making me feel.

    • localeater
      Original Author
      4 years ago

      Thank you all for your kind words. And Mtn- loved the article.

      Oddly, I am not really sad for DS. He will be fine, he is the one of the most resilient and innerly strong people I know. He will miss some of his co-counselors very much but they face time already with some frequency and now they are making plans to meet up for a camping trip late this summer(which will hopefully work out).

      I am sad for all the kids that wont get to go to camp this summer, for whom the camp is their sanctuary, their refuge. And you all expressed eloquently, just how important places, like camp are to our sense of security in the world. It's another broken tradition, another normal routine crushed.

      So I am sad, and I am angry. I will say it's kind of hard to be angry at a virus. And, I can and will move on to accept this one more loss. This week also saw the postponement of my niece's wedding. She postponed to late August- honestly I dont know if I will be ready to put my family on a cross country flight then.


    • Tina Marie
      4 years ago

      I'm so sorry about his camp! My sister is a diabetes educator (nurse) and has participated in those camps. She loves them!

    • blfenton
      4 years ago


      One of the odder sensations of this moment in the pandemic — three or four or five weeks in — is how large our emotions are for how small our days are. - from Mtn's posted article

      This is so poignant.

      Localeater - I'm so sorry about your son's summer camp being cancelled and yes, he will weather this. The kids I feel so bad for are those who are 5 and 6 and who were just diagnosed with this disease and they will miss out on an experience that has been of such benefit to your son.

      My kids are in that age of friends getting married and the number of weddings that have cancelled this year is heart-breaking. DS1 has been invited to 9 weddings this year and was looking forward to all of them. DS2's is scheduled for the end of June but even if it can go ahead I doubt that any who have to fly or stay at hotels will come.

    • Allison0704
      4 years ago

      Thank you, Mtn. I'm going to forward that to a friend.


      I've had the daughters of two friends marry during our SAH order. One married in her parents LR surrounded by her sisters, and lots of lovely flowers that couldn't get canceled. Photographer was there also. Renewal of vows and reception will take place in the fall. The other married in her parents backyard, also with lovely flowers, siblings and photographer.


    • l pinkmountain
      4 years ago

      Former camp director pitching in here. Camps are notorious for having flu outbreaks rage through them due to the close living quarters. It's for the best, which does NOT change the sadness quotient, but try to have your son look at it as a good thing, we can take actions to solve problems and save lives. But the real point of my post is this, stay tuned because I'll bet your camp is going to come up with some creative way to do something this summer for their campers. That's what camps do, they improvise with what they have. So tell your son that he just needs to be patient, something cool will come out of this. Camp will always be there, but may change with the times a bit.

    • carolb_w_fl_coastal_9b
      4 years ago
      last modified: 4 years ago

      This is a subject at the top of mind for me lately. I've worked in city recreation after school & holiday & summer playcamps for over 2 decades now, and of course as soon as the schools were closed, we were too. It happened just before Spring Break was supposed to start.

      I cannot imagine our having summer camps now. We have hundreds of kids, youth and adults congregated close together all day long & there are more than a dozen camps all over our city. It's a massive undertaking and there is no way to keep all those kids & premises perfectly clean. Some kids are there from 7:30am until 6pm.

      Also thinking about how many parents now out of work have no way to pay for camp anyway.

      So many, too many, children will be sitting home watching screens this summer, when they could have been having all kinds of enriching experiences.

      But I am OK with foregoing this if it means more people will be alive and healthy to enjoy next summer.

    • texanjana
      4 years ago

      I am so sorry for your son, local. His camp sounds like a very special place. I read an article recently about grieving our losses during this time, and I hope your son is able to do that. I am most sad for young people and the elderly at this time. I think they are the ones who are most affected by the loss of social interaction.

    • roarah
      4 years ago

      My heart hurts for all the losses big and small this pandemic has wrought. Give your son my condolences. I am dreading my daughter's sailing camp announcement. I think the writing is on the wall but we still have a little hpoe it might happen and right now hope feels like all we have. Xo

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