Guiding ‘Forgotten Mourners’ Through the Chaos

Madeline Tucci Tannehill remembers the last day of her husband’s life as if it were yesterday.

At 49, Gary Tannehill was still in his prime. In addition to their house in Mission Viejo, the two shared parenting responsibilities for two daughters, a thriving law practice and a loving relationship.

“He was my soul mate,” Madeline, 48, said of their nearly 16-year union. “We constantly talked and strategized until we became emotionally one. He was a great dad who lived for his wife and children -- every night he’d spend 15 minutes with each girl in her room.”

On the night of Feb. 4, 2002, Madeline said, the couple’s youngest daughter -- Emma, now 11 -- asked her dad a question. “You won’t ever leave me, will you, Daddy?”

“Oh, no, honey,” he replied, “I’m going to stay around for a long time. I’m going to see you graduate from college.”

The next day, he didn’t come home from work at the usual time. Five hours later, as his wife made frantic calls to hospitals and friends, a janitor found him at his desk -- dead of a heart attack.

“It’s still very hard to believe,” Madeline said. “There was no opportunity to say goodbye.”

That pain became the genesis of Gary’s Place for Kids, a new center in Orange County that seeks to help grieving children. More specifically, Tannehill said, the place was inspired by the pain of her own daughters in trying to get on with their lives.

“It was just completely chaotic,” Sondra Tannehill, 13, said of the weeks and months after her father’s death. “I couldn’t talk to any of my friends about it, because I didn’t know anyone who’d lost a father.”

When Sondra’s grades began sliding, her mother looked for help. She called hospitals, searched the Internet and attended a bereavement conference. The only children’s grief group she found in Orange County was aimed at the offspring of cancer victims. So she decided to start one herself.

“Grieving children are the forgotten mourners,” Madeline Tannehill said. “We’ve erected a curtain around our kids.”

Gary’s Place for Kids, named in honor of her husband, is intended to change all that. The group meets Monday nights at the Family Resource Center in Mission Viejo, offering free support groups for grieving children, ages 5 to 18. The nonprofit corporation has a dozen volunteer facilitators overseen by paid program director Nina Dreyer, a licensed clinical social worker.

“One of our main requirements for facilitators,” said Dreyer, a graduate of USC’s School of Social Work, “is that they be acquainted with grief. We want them to have an idea how to take people through that process.”

This is especially important for children, who after their loss often feel isolated, uncared for and scared, she said. “It’s an individual process,” Dreyer said. “Each child will react a little bit differently. There’s the shock, of course, and then the sadness and stress adjustment. There will be anger, depression and withdrawal. There are good days, and maybe lots of bad days.”

When children are afforded no opportunity to express and share their feelings, she said, the emotions can be internalized or suppressed only to reemerge later in the form of substance abuse, relationship problems, eating and sleeping disorders, attachment and abandonment issues, bad grades, low self-esteem, suicidal tendencies or a low-grade depression that becomes the “theme” of their life.

“They’ve suffered the loss of a major attachment figure in their life,” Dreyer said. “That’s basic -- someone was there who loved you, cared for you, and protected you and suddenly that person is gone. If these things aren’t handled, they can stay around for years. We try to draw the kids out and give them a place to begin to talk about it.”

The talking began almost immediately at the center’s opening last month, attended by about a dozen children.

“I think it was comforting to know that there are other kids in their situation,” Ellie Mika, 42, said of her three children, ages 10 to 17, whose father, Brian, died last spring. “Children can’t get help from their friends because their friends don’t generally have any experience with death.”

By attending sessions at Gary’s Place, Mika said, she hopes her children will “gain tools to deal with their feelings.”

“I hope they can walk away feeling that they’ve probably experienced the hardest thing they’re ever going to experience in their lives and that they can get through it, feel good again and be happy people,” she said.

Connie Contang, 61, was raising her 5-year-old granddaughter with her husband until he died in April; now she’s doing it alone. “The day he died,” she said, “she just came over and started sleeping with me. I changed her room and did different things to it, but she’s still afraid of sleeping in her own bed. She checks the doors, and is kind of frightened. At church on Sunday, she looks up at the ceiling and blows kisses to Papa. And at night, I can feel that little arm reaching over to pat me -- she’s just reassuring herself that I’m still there.”

At Gary’s Place, she said, her granddaughter will learn to “know that other kids are hurting too and that you just need to adjust to the hurt. I really think it’s a wonderful thing that Madeline’s doing. She seems very devoted to the cause.”

Operated for $1,200 to $1,400 a month, Tannehill said, the center -- now serving about 25 children -- survives on corporate and individual donations, as well as two major annual fund-raisers.

Asked what motivates her to put in all that effort, Tannehill deferred to her daughter.

“I hope to find peace,” Sondra Tannehill said. The loss of her father, she says, “is like a storm going on. I hope that somehow it can be calmed.”