Losing a loved one can be one of life’s most traumatic experiences, especially during a young adult’s formative college years.

“People really don’t ‘do death’ in college,” wrote Jennifer Heidt, a graduate student in the UW School of Law, in an e-mail. “They ‘do’ parties and school and beer and each other, but not significant loss.”

Heidt is one of three students in the process of starting a UW chapter of the National Students of Ailing Mothers and Fathers Support Network (AMF), a support group for grieving students.

Founded in 2004, AMF helps college students remain connected to society while dealing with loss or terminal illness of a parent or a loved one. The organization seeks to turn their losses into victories by raising funds and awareness for cutting edge medical research.

UW medical student Joelle Lucas discovered AMF’s cause when she saw the founder David Fajgenbaum accepting an award on television.

Fajgenbaum established AMF after his mother, Anne Marie Fajgenbaum, died of a brain tumor. The acronym AMF is an homage to his mother’s initials.

“I thought it was awesome how he was taking this terrible tragedy and turning it into something positive,” Lucas said.

Lucas began her senior year at the UW not unlike the thousands of other students around her. Double-majoring in business and French, she felt she was well on her way to a promising career. Already she was working for a start-up consulting firm, in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

Her optimistic outlook would soon receive a dizzying dose of reality.

On Sep. 22, 2002, Lucas got a telephone call, saying that her father had been injured during a paragliding competition and was being flown to an emergency trauma center. As she would later learn, an unexpected gust of wind had tripped him up during take-off. Her father’s head hit the ground hard enough to cause swelling in his brain, despite the fact that he was wearing a helmet. The injury left him in a coma, dependent on doctors and machinery to keep him alive.

After three months without noticeable improvements in her father’s condition, Lucas was forced to make an impossible decision. On Dec. 27, the machines keeping her father alive were turned off. Lucas’ world screeched to a halt and she found herself all alone.

She continued with her studies, but felt a distinct disconnect from other students, who either could not or would not relate to what she was going through.

“It inevitably comes up,” Lucas said. “You know, the basic questions people ask, like, ‘Are you from around here?’ ‘What does your father do?’ And as soon as you say ‘He’s dead,’ the conversation just shuts down.”

Rather than feeling helpless, Lucas decided to transform her pain into something positive. She enrolled in medical school, inspired by the tireless care her father had received from his physicians.

When she contacted AMF to help out, she was put in contact with Heidt, who happened to serve on the AMF’s Board of Directors.

Like Lucas, Heidt had lost her father during her undergraduate studies and found the university system as a whole to be unresponsive.

The administration at Willamette University in Oregon, where she was studying at the time, seemed to be complacent, if not complicit, Heidt said, in what she calls a “silent epidemic.”

“We don’t have a cultural community yet in which it’s ok to talk about loss,” she said, “which kind of gives the administration an excuse not to deal with it.”

To be fair, Heidt acknowledged that information on bereavement among young adults is very scarce, although its occurrence is all too common.

Heidt and Lucas, along with UW medical student Natalie Nielsen, a classmate of Lucas’ who lost her own father, hope that AMF will help other students process their mourning, even years after their loved one has passed away.

“The meaning keeps shifting, evolving,” Lucas said of her grief over her father’s death. “What I was struggling with, say, two years ago, isn’t the same as what I struggle with today.”

See tomorrow’s paper for more about how these women are working to help students deal with grief.

[Reach reporter Christian Nelson at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]