Sad girls will find each other anywhere. Case in point: It’s a Wednesday night at the candlelit restaurant Le Coucou. I’m seated next to actor Beanie Feldstein for dinner, held in celebration of Vogue’s Forces of Fashion, which we will both be speaking at the following day. During small talk, I brought up my celiac disease diagnosis, sharing that it resulted from one of my yearly colonoscopies, something I get because my mother died of colon cancer. (You know, light table chatter!)
But Feldstein’s eyes instantly lit up in the secret way one of us always understands. “Only I would bring this topic up at a fancy dinner party,” she laughs when thinking back, though obviously I had set the table for the conversation. That’s when she started to open up about the loss of her brother, Jordan.
“He was a gifted, brilliant, funny, loving, wonderful person who died unexpectedly almost six years ago,” Feldstein shares. “An incredible father and incredible brother and son, and it was completely out of nowhere.”
Jordan passed away at 40 while Feldstein was starring in Broadway’s Hello, Dolly!. “So much of that time is very blurry,” she says. “What people don’t talk about is not only do you lose a person, but you lose parts of your life as well. You can lose friendships, career pursuits, academic pursuits, even your own identity shifts—there’s so much lost surrounding the loss.”
In the year after, Feldstein says she “worked more than ever, which was a saving grace” and “fell in love with my now wife,” Bonnie. She also felt something many people who have lost a loved one can relate to: “It was this intense juxtaposition between everything I’ve ever wanted coming true and none of it really mattering at the end of the day. It felt unfair that he couldn’t be there to experience it with me and that he was gone.”
A few years later, Feldstein downloaded TikTok. “A few months in, I got this video on my For You page of a little boy talking about his dad dying. Because my brother has two sons, obviously it stopped me in my tracks. He was saying things like, ‘Camp makes me feel less alone because people understand me.’ And I was like, Camp? I went to camp for 10 years. My parents met at summer camp. Camp is a huge part of my identity. After that I went down this huge rabbit hole about Experience Camps.”
Here’s what she learned: Experience Camps is a group of nonprofit and no-cost summer camps across the country for children who are grieving from the death of a parent, sibling, or primary caregiver. The one-week sleepaway camp is meant to serve as many different types of outlets for these children in one place—helping them process their grief, remember they can still play, and realize they are not alone in what happened to them. Immediately, Feldstein knew she wanted to be involved in some way: “I just sent them a cold DM out of the blue and asked how I could help.”
Jesse Moss, Experience Camps’s director of marketing, was at the other end of that message and suggested a Zoom call to talk more.
“Jesse asked me why I had been so touched by the video, and I told her about my brother Jordan,” Feldstein says. “And she just froze.” Moss remembers this moment “pretty vividly.”
That’s when fate, kismet, serendipity, or whatever you choose to believe in came into play: “We made the connection that we both had a brother named Jordan die,” Moss says. “Wild, right? That connection felt so special. I immediately suggested that she should come volunteer at camp.”
All the counselors at Experience Camps are volunteers, though not all have gone through a loss similar to the one the campers have. (Each cabin also has a grief specialist who is a master’s-level-certified mental health professional.) Feldstein says: “It was meant to be in this spiritual, visceral way. It was also an immediate yes.” A few months later, Feldstein and a friend drove up to Smithfield, Maine, for the first day of a new kind of summer camp.
“The camp is on a hill,” Feldstein tells me while reflecting back on last summer. “It feels like you’re walking literally straight up. So you’re working your tush to get up that hill the entire week, but you’re also doing so much work emotionally, processing everything in real time.”
Moss adds that Feldstein was “a dream” at camp. Naturally, she taught drama class, made friendship bracelets, and hosted the talent show—but there were slower, more painful moments too. “There are sharing circles where we talked about the loved ones we lost and grief activities,” Feldstein says. On the final night, there’s a special campfire where everyone is invited to share something about the person who died in their lives. Both women, of course, mentioned their respective Jordans. “Every time I heard her say ‘my brother Jordan,’ it sent chills down my spine,” Moss says, reminding them of the shocking coincidence that brought them together.
Now, Feldstein is gearing up for her second summer as a volunteer at Experience Camps. Fresh off of a seriously successful fundraiser (donations are only way the nonprofit can remain free to all the campers), she invited me to join in as a volunteer next summer—and is clearly talking about the camp every chance she gets.
“I’ve made it very clear to my family and the people that I work with in my career that this is monumental to me,” she says passionately. “I thought I had a heart that was pretty decently sized, but it just grew in an unbelievable way in seven days. This camp changed my soul. I want other people to feel it too.”
