Asked about her work or various volunteer activities, at some point Renée McIntyre will say, “It’s a privilege” about each thing she does. She has dedicated her life to founding and nurturing programs to help children and teens process grief and while on the surface, that type of work might seem emotionally difficult, Renée says you “go with the hope and not the hurt.”

Going with the hope often means going in several directions, such as working with the Guilford and Madison ABC programs, and sometimes it means everyone pulling in one direction, such as this weekend’s Run for The Cove, which benefits the children’s grief management foundation she founded with her husband Bruce McIntyre.

Renée came to Madison in 1969 and worked as a teacher at the former Academy School for years. She later married Bruce, a widower with four young children, and decided to take a step back from teaching to raises their combined five children.

“I was luck enough to be a stay at home mom,” she says. “I have never called them my stepchildren because I had the privilege of raising them. I always thought of them as my heart children. I wasn’t lucky enough to give birth to them, but I was lucky enough to be an influence in their life.”

When their youngest child was a senior in high school, Renée decided she wanted to go back to work, but in the era of No Child Left Behind, she felt teaching had become too restrictive and decided to go another direction.

“I became a social worker because it was the only profession that was licensed at the time,” she says. “I went to UConn and got another master’s and I am so grateful that I got to be a social worker and I feel like I am lucky enough to be doing my life’s work.”

Shortly after getting her masters, Renée got a call from friends Jim and Mary Ann Emswiler. Jim had founded the New England Center for Loss and Transition back in 1995 after losing his first wife, but he, Mary Ann, and Renée wanted to come up with a program that dealt with how children experience grief.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘What about the kids? What about the kids?’ because there was nothing,” she says. “There was absolutely nothing. Eventually I said, ‘Well sure, we can put something together,’ so we spent two years writing the program because there was absolutely nothing for kids who had had a significant loss.”

And so The Cove was born in 1998. The Cove deals specifically with how children and teens manage grief after the loss of a parent or sibling or close family member. Over the years, The Cove grew from one site serving six families to now seven sites across the state that help thousands.

Renée says she had the privilege of being the program director of The Cove for its first five years, but them stepped back due to constraints from her own practice. She later stepped up again after the 2012 elementary school shooting at Sandy Hook in Newtown. A camp, known at the times as Camp Erin Newtown and later Camp Erin Connecticut, opened in the area and Renée helped guide the program and open the free weekend camp camp up to all Cove families.

“It’s a grief camp and no kid wants to be there on that Friday, and then by the end when I do the closing ceremony, I say ‘Alright, who wanted to be here on Friday?’ and no one raises their hand, and then I say, ‘Who wants to come back next year?’ and some of the kids put up two hands,” she says. “It’s really a powerful experience. I have the privilege of volunteering as the clinical director for that.”

Her Life’s Work

Renée is an active volunteer with the Madison and Guilford ABC programs, the clinical director for Camp Erin, a co-founder of The Cove, and as a clinical social worker she focuses on helping adolescents and adults in the areas of grief, self-injury, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

While so much has changed over the years, Renée said so much of grief is still stigmatized and tiptoed around, even with the language people use to describe death, something that can be even more difficult for children.

“The death of a parent is not something you ever get over,” she says. “You get through it over and over again and you revisit it at each development level, and the death of a sibling is the same. Having the opportunity to work through and process it, at least they will have a groundwork of safety and understanding, and that is what kids need.

“One of the ways we keep kids safe at The Cove is we use real language, so we teach our facilitators not to say ‘you lost a parent’ because if you say to a five year old, ‘You lost your dad,’ well, the kid is going to say ‘Go find him.’ We get them use to saying words like ‘dead’ or ‘death.’”

Unresolved grief can be a big issue for kids and tends to present itself in various ways as kids get older, according to Renée, who said places like The Cove and Camp Erin are important because it gives kids a safe place to process grief.

“Hurting kids can look like delinquents and there can be a lot of isolation,” she says. “They can be the only kid in the classroom who on Mother’s Day doesn’t have a mom or Father’s Day doesn’t have a dad.”

In the age of the opioid epidemic, children who lose parents very young is becoming more frequent.

“I think one of the realities that we are just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg is all of these children who have been left behind because of the opioid epidemic and we had a lot of overdoses this summer,” she says. “Suicide and drug overdoses are so stigmatized by society that kids need to be in a place that accepts everything and accepts them and they can have fun.”

The Cove

The Cove is a non-profit and does not receive federal, state, or local funding. It runs on donations alone, the program is free, and children and families who come to The Cove can be in for more than a year and are never turned away.

“Unfortunately at one time it was the best-kept secret in Connecticut and it’s a club that nobody wants to join,” she says. “You don’t realize it until you need it.”

The largest fundraiser for The Cove is the Run for The Cove, held at Hammonasset Beach State Park each October. The run was first created by a group of mothers who had lost their husbands, all of whom happened to be runners. Over the years the run has grown from about 30 people to now more than 1,000 participants.

The run includes The Cove 5K Race, Memorial Walk, and Kids’ Fun Run and Renée said the event is one of the more extraordinary things she has ever seen, to watch as so many families who have endured unimaginable tragedy come together for the event.

“It’s not often that we get to see live courage and that’s what is remarkable about these families—how resilient they are,” she says. “I always say when you are born into a family, there is a circle of love that is created and when that person dies and they are no longer physically in that circle, that circle is still there. One of the things that is very apparent when you go to The Cove race and you see the T-shirts [listing] ‘walking in memory of’ and you see these little kids and you see adults, is that they are honoring someone who is still in their circle of love and it’s a privilege to bear witness to that kind of courage.”

The Run for The Cove is Sunday, Oct. 21 at Hammonasset Beach State Park. For more information on the run or to register, visit www.covect.org.