VA Program Offers Solace to Civilians

Counselors Help Survivors With Loss
By David Finkel

Her son had been killed in Iraq, and Hope Veverka needed someone to talk to.

“It was so horrific, the pain,” said Veverka, the mother of Army Pfc. Brandon Sapp, who died in August when he drove his vehicle over a remote-controlled bomb. “I didn’t want it to destroy me.”

Unable to sleep, Veverka, 45, tried a hospice-based program for dealing with grief. Unable to stop thinking about the person who was the last to see her son while deliberately pushing a detonator, she talked to friends and attended a support group for parents who lost children. All helped somewhat, she says, but it was in an unexpected place — a readjustment center for veterans — where she finally felt some relief.

“These guys, they have served,” Veverka said of the counselors she sees weekly at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Vet Center near her home in West Palm Beach, Fla. “They get it. I can just talk, and they understand.”

More and more relatives of service members who died are learning the same thing, that because of a new bereavement program, vet centers are not just for veterans anymore. In August 2003, as the number of fatalities in Iraq passed the 250 mark, the 206 vet centers across the United States began offering counseling and bereavement services to immediate relatives of anyone in the military to die while on active duty.

The program marks the first time that non-veterans have been eligible for a benefit previously restricted to veterans. Before the program began, civilian family members might go to a vet center as part of a living veteran’s counseling but had to go elsewhere if they needed counseling of their own.

“It’s a big deal,” said Alfonso Batres, chief of the VA’s Office of Readjustment Counseling. “And the families are so grateful that anything is being done.”

The program, which is free and allows unlimited visits, had 367 participants in connection with 252 deaths as of Feb. 1. Eighty-six of the 367 were spouses, 119 were mothers, 64 were fathers, 60 were siblings, 37 were children and one was a grandparent.

Batres says the numbers would be higher, but privacy concerns prohibit counselors from contacting people to see whether they are interested in getting help. Instead, initial contact must come from the family members.

Typically, relatives are referred to the program by military casualty-assistance officers, who are the ones to notify them of the death of their loved ones. A civilian organization called TAPS, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, which offers around-the-clock grief counseling and peer support — but does not have professionally trained counselors as at a vet center — also refers people to the program.

“It’s really, really significant,” TAPS founder and chairman Bonnie Carroll said of the VA’s decision to treat family members. “From our perspective, it has just been revolutionary.”

Batres says that implementing the program has not been problem-free. Especially in the early months, he says, some counselors complained that they already had more to do than they could handle. Others were concerned that expanding the centers’ mandate to non-veterans could create a bad precedent.

The provisional status of the program has also been unsettling to some. Batres says he had hoped to get the program authorized by Congress, which would have given it a sense of permanence, but instead it was approved as an unfunded initiative at the discretion of the secretary of the VA.

Nonetheless, Batres says, as the months have gone by, the nature of the work has changed the misgivings of his staff into a shared sense of mission. “It’s akin to going to a disaster site” is how he describes the work. “This is a death site. It’s almost like going into a sacred place.”

Joe Griffis, a counselor at the vet center in Lake Worth, Fla., agrees that this first venture into treating non-veterans is worthwhile. “We’re here to help the veteran,” he said, “and when they’ve been killed, it’s the closest we can get to them to give them that service.”

Griffis says he has treated family members connected to five deaths, four of which occurred from enemy fire and one by suicide.

“They come in with grief, with a great sense of loss, often with guilt feelings about what they could have done, angry at the government, angry at God, angry at the child himself,” he said of his clients, most of whom have been parents.

Rather than diagnosing a condition, he says, his goal is to “let them ventilate all of their feelings. Their anger. Their grief. Their sadness. No matter what it’s about. And let them have a feeling of relief before they walk out of the session.”

Veverka, who is one of Griffis’s clients, says that is exactly what has happened to her in her weekly sessions.

“There was something lacking,” she said of the support groups she attended in the first days after her son’s death, where she found herself undifferentiated from the parents whose child had died of leukemia and the parents whose child had been killed crossing a street. “It was only addressing half of my emotions. I needed something with the military.”

Try the vet center, someone suggested.

“So I went,” she said of a place so familiar to her now that counselors have hung a photograph of her son for her to see every time she walks in the door, “and it ended up being the door I needed.”