Camp Widow

When Michele Neff Hernandez was 35 years old, her husband Phillip went out for an evening bike ride and never came home. He was hit by a car and died an hour later. Along with the challenges of caring for a blended family of six children, Michele struggled to find people who felt like her. Born out of this need to connect with other people who understood the life-altering experience of widowhood, she launched Camp Widow, a community where every attendee, volunteer, speaker, and staff member has lost their partner. From across the U.S. and around the world, adults of all ages and backgrounds gather in various locations – San Diego, California; Toronto, Canada; Tampa, Florida – to share their experiences of partner loss while insulated from the concerns, demands, and judgments of daily life. Weary of platitudes about grief, campers share their experiences coping with the sometimes devastating financial impact of widowhood; they commiserate over the unsolicited and at times invasive sympathy of strangers; and they offer pointers about how to talk to well-meaning friends who think they should be “moving on.”