MVN - Most Valuable Network

Moyer’s Perfect Pitch

I barely remembered her story. Erin Metcalf, a teenager stricken with liver cancer, met then-Seattle Mariners pitcher Jamie Moyer and his wife, Karen, at a Make-a-Wish Foundation dinner they attended with his then-teammate, Jeff Fassero. The Moyers befriended Erin and her parents. Two years later, her body died but she didn’t, so far as they were concerned.

The Moyers decided, wisely enough, that bereaved children should not have to remain as isolated in grief among their peers as occurred for too many generations. But they also did something about it. Already the creators of a foundation aimed at helping children in any kind of distress, the Moyers, parents of their own six children, opened Camp Erin, in Washington State, in 2002.

There came three camps in Washington state and one each in Idaho, Arizona, and Philadelphia, for whose Phillies Moyer now pitches. And Monday afternoon Moyer delivered an irresistible pitch: five years after the first Camp Erin opened, the work’s beginning on expanding it to every city hosting a major league baseball team.

The Moyers plan to open eight camps this year and ten more by summer 2008, including one each in Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, Tampa, Boston, Cincinnati and two each in Chicago and New York. If you know any child whose world has just been hit by the spiritual terrorism of a loved one’s death, point him or her to Camp Erin if and when one gets built near you.

They can spend a weekend there in camp activities, a little counseling, and a lot of soul support, with a peer group that just might take away an awful lot of the singular sting children feel when they think they have nobody their own age who knows what they’re feeling. On the house.

“The emotional part of this,” said Karen Moyer, whose husband lost the composure for which he’s renowned on the mound while announcing the expansion, “is that we never had any idea it would ever get this big.”

Erin Metcalf probably had a pocketful of last wishes before her unwanted disease claimed her. Moyer wanted to make one of them come true: helping other children, such as her own siblings, who live with the wrench of a loved one’s death at too young an age. There are likely to be a lot of them in the United States. Fourteen million of them, according to some reports, face a parent’s death before graduating high school.

That would equal almost a child and a half for every dollar the Moyers have kicked into Camp Erin thus far. And they won’t be alone among Show families. Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Mike Timlin and his wife, Dawn, have the Moyers’ backs. “I lost my mom. I wasn’t a kid when it happened. But I know how tough it was as an adult to deal with,” Timlin said, while attending the press conference. “So we’re doing anything we can do to help, to provide an outlet these kids can go to for support, which is what really matters here.”

The camp will feature professional bereavement counselors training and working with community volunteers, who “apply for a variety of reasons,” according to Camp Erin’s Website. “Some are in the helping professions and have a special love for children. Some experienced a loss as a child and wish to provide support that was unavailable to them.”

Volunteers will get a direct interview and undergo reference and background checks, not to mention clinical training for helping bereaved children, and the Website notes they give twenty hours of time before camp and 48 hours during a camp session itself.

“Children often do not have an avenue to express their grief or to honor and remember the person they held dear,” the site says. “Through a variety of means, including ritual, drama, arts and crafts, creative writing and physical activities, children have the opportunity to get their feelings out while memorializing their loved one.”

“Seeing children grieve, a lot of times,” Moyer managed to say Monday, “they don’t know where to go. A lot of times, that’s where children get lost in life and take a wrong turn. These kids come to these camps and realize . . . there’s a similarity with other campers.”

And an unbroken circle. Many of those whose first breath of Camp Erin was breathed in grief end up returning. As counselors.

“Imagine losing a brother or sister, or your best friend,” Moyer went on. “When they’re lost, there’s an emptiness. You’re trying to help them deal with that and make them understand that you can get through this together. When the campers come back as counselors, it really makes what we’re doing, to us, worthwhile.”

His wife, who said she’s been to several of the camp sessions herself, concurs. “When you look into the eyes of these innocent children and hear their personal story of losing their loved one, it’s magical to witness the transformation of these kids,” she said. “They trust the camp, they don’t even realize that they’re healing, and they go home knowing it’s all going to be OK.”

So do their parents. “I was devastated, and it was a struggle sometimes for me to get my two brokenhearted children dressed and ready for school,” said Karl Leist, a widower whose children, Tristana and Matthew, got to go to Camp Erin, to ESPN.com Page 2 columnist LZ Granderson. “But after the camp the kids started laughing again and we were able to have fun again, and that really helped me deal with my own heart.

“Before, they felt like the only kids on the planet going through that kind of pain. But they met 40 other kids, and they cried together and did karaoke together and talked, and they realized God just didn’t pick them out but that sometimes bad things happen to good people.”

Those and more kids and families will be a lot luckier than a writer I know who didn’t have a Camp Erin to which to repair. He faced his father’s death before he’d even graduated elementary school. For all he had of a family’s love, he had no one near his own age outside, so far as he knew, who’d been through anything similar. And he felt like a freak.

Around here, that writer’s known as the Catbird in the Nosebleed Seats. And he just deployed his words on behalf of a camp whose message is that childhood bereavement doesn’t make a child a freak. It’s a message he’d have loved hearing when he was ten years old.

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UPDATE—Trevor Hoffman has Jamie and Karen Moyer’s back on Camp Erin, too: the San Diego Padres relief pitcher and his wife, Tracy, are rounding up support for a San Diego-area Camp Erin, based in existing compounds such as Cuyamaca and including visits to Petco Park, according to San Diego NBC. Moyer’s foundation for children says the San Diego-area Camp Erin should open by late fall 2007.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 3:41 am and is filed under Baseball News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.