6 Coloradans took to the Colorado River to grieve. What they found was a way to feel less alone.

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LOMA — On a cloudy Friday morning in August, pickup trucks and Subarus bustled around the Loma boat ramp, dropping off boats and paddlers ready for a weekend of fun on the Colorado River.

Not far away, a small group of people sat in a circle of camp chairs. They, too, were heading out on the river, but for a different sort of trip. 

“We’re going to go around and introduce ourselves,” said Mike Podmore, the leader of the three-day voyage. “Feel free to tell a little bit of your story if you want.”

One by one, the members — all Colorado residents who ranged in age from their 40s to their 70s — shared their stories of death and grief. It was the start of a grief therapy retreat on the Colorado River, and the clients and crew members on the trip had lost parents, children and life partners. This moment was what they came for: a chance to open up space in their day-to-day lives to grieve. With other people who know what it’s like. Without having to act like they were holding it together. 

The introductions continued around the circle. The clients agreed to let The Colorado Sun join the trip and quote them anonymously in order to protect the therapeutic process.

“Sorry, I’m kind of …” a man said, pausing to collect himself. He was his father’s caregiver for three years until his dad died this summer, a week shy of his 89th birthday.

“I’m just kind of split wide open right now,” he said. “And this just sounded like a good idea.”

Humans are wired to grieve: Researchers say grief goes hand-in-hand with love and is rooted in deep, evolutionary and physical bonds. But there is a lot left to learn, and misconceptions about grief — like when someone should “feel better” — can do more harm than good. The retreat’s six guests came to the Loma boat ramp at a different place in their grief journeys. What they found along the Colorado River was a way to feel less alone in the process — and time to honor their loved ones.

Often dubbed the workhorse of the West, the Colorado River and its tributaries provide water for 40 million people and a multibillion dollar agriculture industry across seven Western states and Mexico. The river’s water makes its way into faucets, showers, cropland and hydropower plants across Colorado.

But the river also carries memories. It’s a place where children grow up fishing, swimming and rafting. For some Native American tribes, the river has a spiritual significance. For Podmore, a long-time rafter and cofounder of the retreat program, the river carried the ashes of his wife, who died suddenly from cancer more than a decade prior. 

There’s a kind of magic that happens on each retreat, Podmore said in an interview a few days after the trip ended. People are able to stop feeling like they have to convince themselves, or others, that they’re OK. It’s like lifting off armor, he said.

“Immediately they realize … they’re surrounded by people who truly understand what they’re going through,” Podmore said. “That’s half the recipe for this magic that we’re talking about.”

The things they carried

Some group members were strangers when they set out to travel about 25 miles from Loma, Colorado, to Westwater, Utah, through Ruby-Horsethief Canyon. Some were mourning loved ones who died a decade, or months prior. Some arrived carrying old photos of their loved ones in their wallets. Or memories of horrible weeks leading up to, and after, deaths.

None of them knew what to expect from the trip, a Grief and Honor on the River Retreat offered by Pathfinders, a nonprofit that offers counseling and support services in the Roaring Fork Valley. 

In their seven years of operation, Podmore and Pathfinders have offered about 20 grief retreats on the Colorado River for over 160 clients of all ages — including everyone from children to seniors — mostly from the Roaring Fork Valley in western Colorado. 

Sitting in a camp chair at Loma boat ramp, crew member JD Wise recalled his first retreat. He was a client for that trip: In 2021, his son, Alder, died during childbirth after a normal pregnancy. He and his wife almost turned around before they reached the boat ramp.

“I think we were both not sure we were ready to enter a space like this,” Wise said. “I’m really grateful that we did.”

With each introduction, the walls started coming down. Everyone on the trip had had a significant loss. No one would have to translate their experiences or put on the mask of being OK. Everyone already knew what it was like.

Experiences of grief vary widely. When a close loved one dies, the loss forces brains and bodies to reconfigure deep, powerful bonds. It leaves people reeling.

When trauma is involved in the death — or when the person grieving has experienced trauma, especially during childhood — there may be complications during the grieving process, like having acute emotions that keep them from functioning in daily life for longer than six months. Some studies say around 10% of adults or more will experience grief complications.

But there are shared experiences: The stunned feeling after finding out, even foggy memories of entire days. The yearning to see that person, to hear their voice or to regain a sense of them by smelling a coat or perfume bottle. The sense of isolation. 

One woman recalled her husband’s fight against cancer. She gave him shots, she said. She has a physical tremor and couldn’t hold both the syringe and the medicine, so the pair came up with a system. He’d hold one item, and she’d hold the other. Eleven years later, she carries a photo of him every day.

They talked about how confusing it can be to lose someone to suicide. The hellacious days leading up to and following a death. They shared what it’s like to feel waves of grief come and go. 

“Right now, I’ve kind of been in a slump,” said a woman whose son and husband died within months of each other in 2023. “This is probably really good to go out in the river and just meditate and let my grief float away for a bit.”

LeeLee, who agreed to share her first name, said her husband died in December from bladder cancer. She had helped him through surgery to remove his bladder, and he learned to live with a bag for two years. Then his cancer spread. 

He didn’t want anyone else to know he was dying, she said. He was a private man, the “rock” for everyone, and he didn’t want anyone taking care of him.

“Keeping it quiet was tough,” she said. “I’m still so grateful. He was my second husband, so we still had 17 years together. I’m so grateful for that. But I miss him so much every day.”

“Let nature really support us”

Soak in the feeling of the water, the walls of the canyon and the beauty, Robyn Hubbard, a grief counselor, reminded the others before the small flotilla departed Aug. 15.

“It’s not like we have to carry each other’s heaviness,” she said. “We can let nature really support us.”

There’s a sense of safety and steadfastness in nature, Hubbard told The Sun after the retreat was over. The soaring canyon walls inspired a sense of awe and its remote location offers a reprieve from cellphone notifications, emails, errands and daily responsibilities.

“Being in the midst of grieving and having your breath taken away by beauty: Awe still lives inside us even in the midst of our most difficult moments,” she said. “That’s a connecting experience.”

A large body of research has shown connections between natural environments and improved mental health, even for the experience of grief. River imagery often makes its way into therapeutic exercises as a way to help someone let go or cope with a different experience.

There’s a lot researchers are still trying to understand about grief and the potential impacts of nature on mental health. Why does it take so long to process grief? How does grief impact bodies and minds? Does it matter if someone’s version of “nature” is a national forest, a city park or a home filled with plants — or how frequently they seek nature out?

On the Pathfinders trip, nature found its way into music, movement and breathing exercises and collaborative poetry — sometimes in bittersweet ways.

On the boats, conversations would skip naturally from memories of a lost loved one to spotting wildlife and encouraging the rowers as they fought the current, allowing time for both healing and taking a break from difficult emotions. 

In a poetry activity, clients wrote about a night without anxiety next to the river, washing away sadness with cold water, and the steady sounds of flowing water or the silence of the desert.

Sometimes nature brought up bittersweet memories of rafting trips with those they lost. One person recalled spreading her husband’s ashes in the Roaring Fork River further upstream, wondering whether his ashes would have floated downstream to Ruby-Horsethief Canyon. 

“I think doing this river trip has been especially moving for me,” one woman said on the last day as the group shared thoughts on the trip. It’s where her husband, who fought cancer for three years, died.

“He walked into the river, laid down and floated away,” she said. “I feel that all the time in the currents of the river. … You know, it touches my heart to be on the river just because of that.”

The science of grief

Understanding loss also means talking about love — and attachment bonds, psychologists and researchers say.

“Loss is just love being expressed in a different form,” said Angie LeRoy, a grief researcher and assistant professor at the University of Northern Florida. 

Attachment bonds form in newborns and their parents. Infants seek closeness and are often not happy when they are away from their parents. That behavior is part of an attachment bond — and a survival instinct, LeRoy said.

Adults often form similarly deep attachments with romantic partners or in other intimate relationships, she said. Romantic partners co-regulate each other’s body systems, like the central nervous system. Their sleep-wake cycles become intertwined. Natural opioids play a role in forming bonds, giving people a sense of reward from relationships.

“When you first fall in love with someone, you just want to be around this person all the time,” LeRoy said. “That’s part of the attachment system working.”

When a person dies, grief is an instinctive response, experts said. 

Once a deep bond is disrupted, there are ripple effects across the brain and body. When one partner is missing from the bed, even for a short trip, it can impact the other person’s body temperature and heart rate. When people go looking for someone for support but they’re not there, brains can perceive a threat and trigger the fight-or-flight response.

Some experts compare symptoms of grief to an addiction withdrawal response, LeRoy said. People yearn for their loved ones: They want back what they can’t have.

Grieving is also about re-learning, according to Mary-Frances O’Connor, who researches how the brain processes loss at the University of Arizona.

Attachment bonds come with a deep belief that a loved one will always be there: No one expects their loved one to die, even when someone has been sick for a long time, she said in a 2023 TedX Talk

When they’re not — a person dies or a couple ends a relationship — it takes time for the brain to gather enough new information and memories to understand that they are not around anymore. It’s like living in two different realities, O’Connor said.

Just as brains are wired to experience grief, they are also built to help a person move through grief, she said.

“It takes a long time and lots of experiences before we can predict their absence more often than their presence,” O’Connor said.

That re-learning process does not happen in five distinct stages, LeRoy said, referring to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. (On the Pathfinders trip, several clients described grief as a spiral or something that comes in waves.)

Misconceptions about grief stages and timelines can be harmful, she said.

“I think people are getting punished for being stuck in places they’re not actually stuck in,” LeRoy said. “It’s just that they needed to go back there to whatever stage for a minute.”

“I’m giving myself permission to be a mess”

For those on the Pathfinders retreat, the experience was about honoring those who have passed away and their own grief journeys — whatever form they take, the organizers said.

The Pathfinders program was not meant to “fix” or “heal” grief or even provide in-depth, long-term therapy. It’s a way to share stories and sit with memories of loved ones — without judgment and with a safety net of professional support.

“For a lot of people, this is the hardest experience of their lives to date. We want to treat it with that importance,” Podmore said. “Honoring your grief is like understanding what an important part of life experience this is. Giving it the space and support to help you understand it and get through it.”

During the retreat, the clients and crew let their emotions come to the surface. They cried together and shared the joy of sitting in the sunshine and swimming in the river. (A few even mooned the California Zephyr train as it passed by inside the canyon, a rafting tradition in that stretch of the river.)

Each day closed with a group dinner, provided by eight crew members who worked constantly to take care of camp chores and logistics — all to make sure clients had a weekend where they could focus entirely on self-care.

“I’m a little surprised by just how it’s possible to feel a little lighter and just have more fun,” a woman said during group check-in on the second day. “I wasn’t expecting being in the doldrums by any means, but it’s just been nice to experience everybody getting to know each other and just enjoying each other.” 

“And sharing a few stories that we don’t necessarily share with people,” another woman added.

The trip embodies how to support a person who is grieving, the crew said. Listening without judgment. Opening up time for people to share stories of loved ones. Helping someone feel safe enough to sit with painful memories.

“The biggest message is that there’s no handbook,” Mack Bailey, a music therapist on the trip, said. “You just navigate the best you can.”

In the morning on the second day of the trip, the group sat in a circle of camp chairs just yards away from the Colorado River and watched as Bailey pulled out his guitar and lyrics.

They grew quiet as they listened to him sing, accompanied by the soft rush of wind through leaves and water in the Colorado River. 

The lyrics came from their own words — thoughts and feelings shared during a music therapy session. 

Bailey hoped the group would re-listen to the song after the trip, feeling less raw each time they heard their words reflected back to them. It was a way to add degrees of separation between the heart and the trauma, without changing the story.

It was a way to feel less alone in grief, he said.

When he finished singing, there was a pause. Several people wiped their eyes. 

“Those are all your words,” Bailey told the group. 

“It could have been any of us,” a man said. 

“All of us,” another person responded.

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.