Dear Friends,

As I sit down to write this letter we are all anxiously awaiting the monsoon rains that will help cool our summer and relieve some of the stress that is brought on by this intense heat. We sure feel this for our families who are attending our summer intergenerational support group nights. Our team, led by Kristin Harrison, has developed some beautiful and cool ways to help our children, teens and caregivers express and share their grief. You can read about the newest activity below.

We are very grateful for our partnership with the Jewish Community Center! They are providing us with a wonderful meeting space for our Young Adult support group.  The space is beautiful, with a stunning view of the Catalinas. Moving the Young Adult group off campus will provide us with an additional night to host a Children to Children bereavement group here at Tu Nidito. We currently have a waiting list (for the first time in our history) so we are eager to get this up and running.

To meet the growing need for grief support in our community, we need to train more volunteers than ever before. Our new Coordinator of Volunteer Services, Rachael Blackketter, has some innovative ways to engage and train volunteers. We are always looking for places to do outreach. If you have a business, community group or faith-based organization that would be willing to host an outreach event, please let us know. And I want to thank all the volunteers who are working with our families over the summer. So many of you have stepped up to fill in for vacationing volunteers which has been a tremendous support for our team and our families.

I would also like to thank some of our donors! Gadabout, Dental Pros, The Bourn Companies, That Hazen Family Foundation, David Lapan, and Jose and Adriana Rincon who are supporting our Dueling Pianos Event on September 8th at Arts Express Theater. I hope you can join us for this joy-filled event! Also, we are back as a beneficiary of El Tour de Tucson with a goal of having 40 riders on our team. I want to thank those of you who have already joined and encourage all our cyclist friends to Ride for A Child.

As always, our Tu Nidito team is honored to serve the grieving community and to have each of you supporting us.

Here’s to the Monsoon!

Yours,

Liz McCusker, 

Executive Director

Meet the New Members of Our Team!

Welcome Paloma Sainz, our new Bilingual Support Specialist!

Paloma is an artist, a silly and passionately deep thinker of a person. She's traveled to many places in Mexico, South America, and the US. Her experiences have shown her different sides of humanity, both beauty and brokenness. This has fueled something in her to try to make the world a better place. Now, she pursues this endeavor with the rest of us at Tu Nidito. 

Welcome Rachael Blackketter, our new Coordinator of Volunteer Services!

Rachael has spent her adult life in Tucson, and caring for others in her community is one of her core values. She has worked in support of children in foster care and rescue animals. She loves to read to children and has served as ground crew for children taking flight. She believes that volunteering is powerful - it's the reason she met and adopted two of her four children. She believes that volunteers can truly change lives, and she's looking forward to doing just that with our volunteers at Tu Nidito. 

What's Happening at The Nest...

Full rainbow over the Sonoran desert.

  Rain and Rainbows

This time of year, many of us have the same thing on our minds: rain. 

We're all anxiously awaiting that beautiful and fragrant time of the year when the monsoons come pouring down, breaking up the heat, bringing new life to the desert, and cooling us all off. While we wait, we at Tu Nidito thought we'd bring the rain to our kids and families. 

Rain and Rainbows is Tu Nidito's newest group activity, and it provides more than just relief from the summer heat. 

When we talk about grief in our support groups, we like to say that grief means the thoughts, feelings, and actions we experience after someone special dies. Experiencing grief is very difficult. In our groups, we say that grief can feel like we are trapped in a dark cloud full of rain. It's with this in mind that we ask families to share their own experiences with grief, what they're feeling, what's been difficult. 

While grief can feel like there is no end to it, we like to remind our children and families, that just like a dark rain storm, there is a rainbow at the end of their journey.

In rain, and in our grief, we can still look for rainbows. Rainbows can be a sign of hope. They are beautiful things that emerge during and after rain. They can bring happiness, joy and light to dark times. It's at this point we ask families to share something that makes them feel hopeful about the future. 

After sharing and listening, we bring the group's attention to the giant inflatable rainbow in our Celebration Garden. This represents our hopes. When we turn on the hose and water comes out of the rainbow, this rain represents our grief.

We then invite group members, as families, to run through the water together and come out the other side feeling wet, maybe a little uncomfortable, but also feeling a bit happy, silly, and even hopeful. 

Signage at the entrance of event

Don't Compare Tomatoes - A Grief Support Story

This story comes from Sophia Dunne, our Support Specialist. 

What I saw, heard, and felt on the 6th floor of Banner University Medical Center felt like another world. A world where children are sick and tomatoes are the size of houses. 

We walked through the sliding glass doors of Banner and to the back of the hospital where an elevator took us to the sixth floor. 

A large mechanical door opened to the Pediatric Oncology Unit. We stepped through a hallway with curtains on either side. Behind each curtain, I saw the faces of children. They were all laid back in massive chairs, arms extended with IV bags alongside them. For the whole length of the long hallway, the curtains stretched, each one shadowing a child with cancer.

At the end of the hallway was the staff break room, where nurses, an oncologist, and a nurse practitioner gathered.  My coworker and I introduced ourselves. We shared that we were from Tu Nidito, a place for children and families who are grieving a severe medical diagnosis or the death of a loved one. We even worked with some of the same kids that had come to Banner for treatment. 

We introduced an activity we do at Tu Nidito with our families: Rock, Candle, and Elephant. This activity helps us verbalize and share our experiences and feelings, something very common at Tu Nidito, but felt missing in that staff break room. These nurses spent their days thinking about others’ feelings. The concept of sharing their own felt new and there was hesitation. “I don’t do candles and elephants,” one nurse said. 

We began by passing the rock around the circle of nurses. They each shared something smooth and surface-level, like a rock. They shared how long they worked at Banner and their favorite part of their job. After the rock was passed around, we brought out the candle. The candle represents something a little warmer and deeper in us. Then the elephant took to the floor, and everyone shared their elephant in the room, their heaviest hidden feelings or experiences.

Table set up with Rock, Candle and Elephant activity.

After each item had passed through the circle of nurses, I was in awe of the people in this room. Everyone’s rocks, candles, and elephants were all out in the open, and it turned out they looked very similar. These nurses existed in another world, with a different definition of hardship, much different from the world I left when I got to the 6th floor. These nurses’ elephants were that they struggled each day after work, stepping back out into the world. Nurses shared the anger and resentment they felt toward their family and friends who complained about flat tires and dirty dishes after they had spent their day holding the hand of a child with cancer. A nurse shared she knew she wasn’t supposed to compare tomatoes. 

This nurse used the term tomatoes to refer to individual hardships that we all have and that all look different. Everyone has their own tomatoes, even if it’s a flat tire, so we aren’t supposed to compare our tomatoes to others. Yet this nurse couldn’t help but feel her tomatoes were massive, obviously bigger than most people’s tomatoes. Heads nodded and tears spilled. These nurses lining the walls of this little break room on the 6th floor, all had enormous tomatoes.

I realized, while they were sharing, that their stories all had one thing in common: they loved each other, their coworkers. And their elephants all spoke of how much bigger they felt their tomatoes were than others who didn’t exist on the 6th floor every day. As I looked at these faces, and their rocks, their candles, and their elephants all out in the room with us, I shared my realization. We all have the same need for our co-workers' support and the same pains from seeing what only exists within the Pediatric Oncology Unit. That is support. To have each other, people who can nod their head when you share your heaviest and even darkest feelings, because they have experienced and felt these feelings. 

That is the power of peer support, something we grow here at Tu Nidito. After giving themselves permission to share their elephants, my hope is the nurses working in the Pediatric Oncology Unit of Banner have discovered and felt the strength and comfort of being surrounded and supported by others with the same size tomatoes. Tu Nidito helps connect children and families together who have similar experiences. As I witnessed on the sixth floor of Banner and within our painted walls at Tu Nidito, there is so much comfort and relief to be found within others who understand our experiences and feelings.

Calling on New Volunteers

If you want to give back, now is your chance! Tu Nidito is accepting applications for volunteer Support Group Facilitators. 

If you are a caring, consistent adult, then Tu Nidito can use your help. We’re looking for more volunteers to help in our evening support groups. 

We will train you to facilitate discussions and activities for children, teens, young adults, and caregivers. 

Apply today and join our next Support Group Facilitator Training on Saturday, July 22, 2023 from 9am to 4pm. Light breakfast snacks and lunch will be provided. 

Email Rachael at [email protected] to register or use our form below. 

This is rewarding and human-centered work, and we couldn’t do it without you. Tu Nidito values its volunteers, who help us ensure that no child grieves alone. 

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