San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A helping hand on a painful journey
Nonprofit offers assistance to children, families grieving the loss of loved ones
It’s always hard to talk about death, but especially so for a child grieving the loss of a parent, one who’s struggling to cope with powerful emotions while the family contends with a loss of income that might make it difficult to pay the rent.
That’s why the children who go to the nonprofit Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas are given ways to express themselves without putting their feelings into words. Marian Sokol, the executive director, calls it the “expressive arts.”
In an intake room, the children draw illustrations of their grief. One boy drew himself in a rainstorm with the word “Why?” scrawled all around him. There is a room with padded walls and a punching doll where they can take out their anger — or use a drum set. In another room, a stage has been built into an artificial tree under a skylight where children can act out their emotions, fantasies and dreams.
“They need to be told in a language they understand — or they need to be helped to understand — that death happens, and it hurts. But they can feel that it’s OK to go on,” Sokol said. “Our vision for this center is that no child should have to walk that painful journey of grief alone.”
In the eight years Sokol has been leading the bereavement center it has grown into one of the largest of its kind in the U.S., serving 2,000 children and caregivers a year. With a staff of 12 full-time counselors, the center offers grief therapy sessions to individuals and groups, serving children and young people ages 3 through 23. Thanks to a patchwork of funding raised under Sokol’s leadership — from the city, county and local philanthropists — it is all at no cost to the visitors.
Steady growth
In August, the near North Side center celebrated the opening of a 6,000-squarefoot addition featuring a teen and young adult center with eight counseling rooms. It is the latest of several expansions overseen by Sokol. In 2017, the center opened a satellite location in Harlingen, in the Rio Grande Valley.
That same year, it responded to the church shooting in Sutherland Springs by sending counselors into the area’s schools.
“Then we decided we just couldn’t leave,” Sokol said. After winning a state grant to help with recovery efforts, the center opened a location in nearby Floresville, operating under the name Paloma
Place.
The center, which was founded in 1997 as a support group, also has five full-time counselors working in local schools, mostly in underserved areas on the South and West Sides. Sokol said she hopes to expand the schoolbased program to serve more families that can’t make it to the center.
Local philanthropist Harvey Najim, who donated money for the recent expansion, said the bereavement center serves as a model for similar facilities across the U.S. In describing Sokol, he offered a quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
“She epitomizes that to the Nth degree,” Najim said. “She is one of the kindest, sweetest people that I think I’ve ever known. I just really admire what she does.”
Linda Fugit, an interior designer and long-time volunteer at the center who helped come up with the colorful design for the expansion, credited Sokol with providing the initiative that has made the center one of San Antonio’s best-known nonprofits.
“The energy it takes to drag
an entire cadre of people with you is enormous. You have to have the heart for it, and Marian definitely has the heart for it,” she said. “She takes the time. She goes to funerals, she has lunch. She just doesn’t let go, and I think that’s her strongest asset: this insurmountable amount of faith and presence.”
Seeing potential
The center’s expansion could serve as the capstone of Sokol’s more than four-decade career in childhood development. She says that she hopes to retire in two years, though her plans don’t always work out: She had been planning to retire when she was offered the job as executive director in 2013.
Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she came to San Antonio with her husband in the late 1960s when he enrolled in officer school with the Air Force. After he served in Vietnam, they were stationed for three years at Yokota Air Base on the outskirts of Tokyo. The time they spent in Japan had a strong impact on Sokol, she said, giving her a love of travel — she and her husband have been to 35 countries — and of simplicity of design. They now have two children and two grandchildren.
Upon returning to the U.S., she earned a doctorate in early childhood education from the University of Texas at Austin.
“I was just always fascinated by them,” she said of children. “I’ve just always been
fascinated by how this little tiny helpless baby can then fast-forward 18 years or so and you’ve got a young, budding college student, in some cases, or in others, you have someone who’s frustrated, angry at the world. The children weren’t born any different. They just had different opportunities.”
She had planned to devote her career to teaching but instead became executive director of Any Baby Can, an early childhood development nonprofit she co-founded with a group of volunteers. After leading the nonprofit for 21 years, she took on a new role as president of the National SIDS Alliance, an advocacy group with a mission to prevent infants from dying in their sleep.
The bereavement center, on West Olmos Drive, has none of the stark, fluorescentlighted feel of many therapy centers. In some places it has a homey feel, with plenty of sunlight, artwork on the walls and a long wooden table for communal dinners of tacos or pizza. In other places it has the colorful and eclectic feel of an Antoni Gaudí building. The most striking area of the recent addition is the “Peaceful Pathway,” a hallway decorated with a tile floor of butterflies and lizards and a wall of artificial trees in front of a mural of San Pedro Creek, funded with a donation from SWBC.
Butterflies are a common feature of the center’s decor, serving as a symbol of transformation, Sokol said. Three
walls have been turned into “memory walls,” decorated with framed photographs of the loved ones of children and young people who have come through the center.
“It just feels like family, and that what it needs to be,” she said. “It’s a place where they can cry, but it’s also a place where they can laugh and can heal. It just feels safe.”
Pandemic challenges
The past year and a half has been a challenging time for the center. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it had to suspend all in-person therapy groups and conduct meetings by Zoom. The children grew tired of meeting online and they couldn’t do the arts activities that are an important part of the center’s therapy process, Sokol said.
The center has resumed in-person sessions but kept them smaller and less frequent than before — five days a week for individual counseling and four days for group sessions.All had previously been seven days a week. Depending on infection numbers, Sokol said she hopes to expand the in-person sessions this fall. The center was able to operate two camps this summer in the Hill Country. Typically, it operates three or four camps a year.
Sokol is now working on creating an endowment to give the bereavement center more financial stability. In the past year, the center received its first estate gift. The “next big step” is to encourage more people to donate that way, she
said.
The center also offers therapy groups for parents who are bringing their children to use its services. When Manda Kelley and her family went through the center after the death of their son in 2013, she and her husband decided to attend adult therapy while their children went to sessions upstairs.
The therapy helped them work through the many stresses and traumas of losing a child, she said, helping them with questions such as whether they should hang a stocking for him at Christmas.
“It’s one of those places where you just get to know the staff,” Kelley said. “It sounds kind of odd, I know, but Marian is the type of person who takes such a personal interest in the people who come through the center that she just gets to know the people.”
After her family became involved with the center, Kelley was asked to join its board about two years ago. She recalled that Sokol begins board meetings by telling a story about a situation she has dealt with at the center they can learn from.
“I think that Marian’s true gift is that she’s compassionate,” Kelley said. “It’s a big organization, with lots of staff and counseling, but she never loses sight of why the center is there and what the mission of the center is, which is to help children through a very, very difficult time in their lives, and get them to a place where they’re able to cope.”