Growing Greatness from Grief: Kimberly Mills Uses Her Experience to Help Children Learn to Cope with Loss By Meg Hale Brunton

Hailing from Asheville, NC, Kimberly Mills went from the mountains to the beaches of Charleston, SC to share her experiences in surviving grief through her non-profit Sweet J’s Clubhouse. Mills admits that she is not a certified counselor, but one would be hard-pressed to find anyone else who has suffered more loss than she has in her 42 years.

“If you haven’t experienced a loss, it’s kind of hard to put yourself in their position,” Mills says of her clients. “I definitely know first-hand what grief looks like and the effects of it.”

Mills lost both her parents by the time she was eighteen years old. Her father, a recovering alcoholic, died of heart complications when she was fourteen. Then, when she was eighteen, her mother passed away due to kidney failure while she was on a senior trip to Florida with her class. The school paid to fly Mill’s older brother down to break the news to her. “I just screamed, I didn’t know what to do,” she remembers. “Then, I passed out.” 

Mills recalls waking up and finding herself surrounded by her friends, who had all declined spending the day at the beach so that they could be there to cry with her and make her feel loved. Mills says she will never forget the support she received from her friends and from T.C. Roberson High School. “That was the beginning of my life changing,” Mills says. “I had to grow up instantly.” On the heels of such a palpable loss, Mills went on to attend college at Shaw University. She failed her first year, due mainly to excessive partying, drinking, and poor decisions. 

After that experience, Mills moved to Durham to live with a cousin. It was there she began writing down her feelings. She recalls writing a great deal on the subject of her anger toward God for taking her parents away from her. Then, she felt God was telling her that all the loss in her life was meant to teach her something she could impart onto others.

Eventually, Mills decided to finish her education and moved to Nebraska where she enrolled in Kaplan University. She worked hard and earned her degree in criminal justice. She also became pregnant with her first child and realized how desperately she was in need of some motherly advice. Mills says her mom had taught her so many things, but died before she could really talk to her about being a parent. 

She had also recently reconnected with her older sister who had five children of her own. “My sister and I had a really rough relationship growing up,” she explains, “but in the last few years, we had become really close.” When she was eight months pregnant, Mills moved back to Asheville to be closer to her sister. Tragically, on the day Mills arrived, her sister died of cancer. Mills was devastated.

After a few years, Mills decided to start her life anew in Charleston, SC. Shortly after moving, she received word that her cousin had been murdered, teaching Mills yet another painful lesson about grief. “When you grieve, you grieve differently,” Mills explains. You grieve differently for different relationships, and you grieve differently over different causes of death. She says losing someone to murder enraged her. “I wanted to retaliate. I wanted everyone to feel the same pain that my cousin felt.”

Again, Mills turned to writing – this time, she wrote a book. In 2013, Mills published My Truth: Enduring Death on Many Levels. In it, she shares her own losses, how she has learned to cope, what the bible says about death, and ways to keep lost loved ones close to your heart. She says she owes most of the book’s success to her confidant and biggest fan, her older brother. “My biggest supporter to this day was my older brother,” she says. A few years after the book was published, he died of complications due to epilepsy and COPD.

“It seems like every ten years, I lose someone close to me,” Mills says. She wished she had had a safe place to go to grieve and let out the emotions she was feeling. She recalled feeling the same way over losing her parents when she was a child. “I felt like an outcast,” she remembers. “I wish I had a place I could go to be with other kids like myself. I wouldn’t have made the mistakes I made.” 

Wanting to prevent another child from feeling the same negative emotions she felt, Mills created Sweet J’s Clubhouse (SJCH) on August 14, 2021 to be a home away from home for children who are grappling with grief. Mills named it Sweet J’s after her mother Janice's nickname. The mission of SJCH is to provide support, guidance and love to children who have experienced loss. The group meets one day a month, though Mills hopes to increase it to five days a week.

Mills says a key point to what they do at SJCH is encouraging kids to feel grief in whatever way it comes up for them. “We say, ‘Baby, let out your feelings however you want to let them out,’” she says. “Until we start realizing that we have to stop controlling our kids' emotions, we’re going to need a place like this in every city and state.” The kids in her program often work out emotions through art, including music, theater, drawing, reading and journaling. SJCH even has a partnership with a local farm in Ravenel, SC through which they have created their Urban Equine Connection Program. Mills says that this program teaches the children to love within specified boundaries, as well as to experience the peaceful energy of horses.

Mills says the biggest setback they are currently facing is that they don’t have a headquarters of their own. Right now, they are holding classes from a building on the campus of Stratford High School. “Until we have our own space, we can’t give adequate care,” she says.

Mills feels that the emotional wellbeing of children is the most important issue facing our country today. “All the money needs to be centered around the future of our society – kids,” she says. “I would love to go to Congress and fight to get an emotional support course to be taught in schools.” 

Mills feels that the lack of mental support for kids is a big factor in what has led to the surge in mass shootings, drug addiction, and teenage suicides in this country.

SJCH works with kids from ages 8-18. While they mainly take kids who have experienced loss, they also admit children who are dealing with a parents’ divorce or separation, a parents’ abandonment, a bad breakup, or even the stress of SAT prep. “We don’t close the door to anyone,” Mills says. They are also in the process of working on a two-week camp program called Kenny’s Kids’ Camp that Mills has named after her father.

Mills hopes that, one day, she will open locations for SJCH in North Carolina and Georgia. “I would love for Sweet J’s to be everywhere,” she says, stating that places to heal are much healthier alternatives to mental institutions or jail. “Emotional support of children is priceless.”

While she is encouraged by the community’s response to SJCH, Mills acknowledges that they are in desperate need of support, in the form of donations and volunteers for everything from childrens’ programs to bookkeeping.    

Besides being SJCH’s CEO, Mills also works full-time, is a single mom, and hosts her own radio show From Grief 2 Greatness every Saturday on iHeartRadio/WDRB. She admits it often feels like an insurmountable amount of work, but she knows she is carrying out her true purpose in life. “This is my biggest passion,” she expresses about her work. “I haven’t made a dime out of this and I don’t care if I do. “

Though Mills says that grief never really goes away, helping others move through their grief has been incredibly therapeutic for her. “Time doesn’t heal, you just learn how to deal,” she says. 

For more information on Kimberly Mills and Sweet J’s Clubhouse visit their website: fromgrief2greatness.org

PHOTO CREDIT: Michelle Bryant Griffith of Fabulous Business Solutions