7/23/2023 0 Comments Camp cheerio zip line![]() ![]() I thought she was crazy, or maybe she just had no idea what I was feeling. She told me that I should do whatever I needed to do in order to process what had happened, but that if anyone could treat the next day like a normal one, it was me. I remember telling one of my friends that I wasn’t sure if I could go to work the next day, and maybe I should call my parents and ask to go home. I felt like my world had been turned upside down, as the most perfect place in the world suddenly became the scene of a child’s tragic death. Although I had only met Sanders in passing, I grieved both her young life and my own innocence deeply. To make things worse, I had barely been allowed to go through with my summer as a CIT by my parents because I was only a few months into recovering from anorexia nervosa at the time, so my mental health was already rocky. The only grandparent I had lost at that point in my life died when I was two, and I just didn’t know what real loss felt like as a privileged and lucky 16-year-old. Up until that night, I had never experienced real grief in my life. If their parents talk to you about what happened when they come to pick-up in 36 hours, you will hold yourself together. If they ask what happened, you will tell them not to worry and change the subject. You will go to work tomorrow if you can, and you will not if you can’t. Tomorrow is the kids’ last day of camp it’s supposed to be the best day of their weeks-if not their summers-and it still will be. Tomorrow, my boss said, would be a normal day. ![]() In that same meeting, we were told that the campers didn’t and would not know about Sanders’ death until they returned home to their parents, who had been sent an email an hour earlier. Surrounded by my friends and coworkers, I saw every degree of grief playing out simultaneously. I felt like someone had placed mediocre-quality, noise-canceling headphones over my ears, and my bones felt oddly obvious to me. I felt cold in the 70-degree evening, and my vision went blurry. that night that, “We lost a child today,” I felt every ounce of blood and every joule of energy drain from my body. I couldn’t fathom any tragedy past a broken arm or a bee sting. ![]() I could braid hair and clean scraped knees all day long what I didn’t know how to do was pop the protective bubble I had placed around my untouchable Camp Cheerio. Our job description is to be responsible, confident, and smiling from ear-to-ear at all times. We were all completely in the dark but didn’t want anyone to know it. When I asked the real counselors if they knew what had happened, they told me that everything was fine and not to worry. When my campers asked me why emergency vehicles had interrupted their soccer games and cheerleading practices, I said that everything was fine and not to worry. When Sanders died, no one was told until many hours later. I never could’ve expected what would happen not even a week into the job. I couldn’t wait to arrive and get a magnetic nametag instead of a sticker, to sit in the front row of the staff photo, and-most importantly-to make an impact on kids’ lives the way my former counselors and CIT’s had on mine. I was 16 at the time, and after being a camper at Camp Cheerio for eight years, I had been dreaming of my first summer working there since I was a little girl. It was my fourth day of work when Bonnie “Sanders” Burney tragically fell to her death from a zipline. I was working as a Counselor-in-Training at Camp Cheerio-a step up from a camper, but a step down from a paid counselor. ![]() On June 11, 2015, a 12-year-old girl died under my and my coworkers’ watch. ![]()
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