Katie Travis, TAPS senior peer mentor coordinator, offers grief counseling services through the Schorman Center at Hospice of Warren County in addition to her broader work with the TAPS program. Submitted photo

No one wants to go through the pain of losing a loved one. For some, after working through their own grief, they use the experience to help others.

Katie Travis, TAPS senior peer mentor coordinator, is one of those people.

Travis, who works full-time with the TAPS program and offers grief counseling through the Schorman Center at Hospice of Warren County, grew up around the military.

“My dad completed basic only days after I was born and served in the Army/Special Forces for the next 27-ish years,” she said.

Growing up as a service member’s child, Travis had the opportunity early on to work with military family members.

“I worked with military children at an after-school teaching art/drama,” she said. “But I got the most fulfillment when I would assist the counselors that came with holding counseling groups on deployment, PCS-ing (permanent change of station), bullying, and all the other challenges of being a military kid. I decided to become a counselor with a goal of working with military kids and spouses.”

Then in 2014, her life and future changed.

“My person (my significant other) died by suicide,” Travis said. “He was an active-duty Army combat medic that was battling PTSD. My world imploded; nothing seemed right for a very long time, but I found a grief counselor and put in the work on my post-traumatic grief journey.”

Travis said she found a lot of doors closed to her because she and her partner were not married.

“The government did not consider me his family and I received no form of assistance from them,” she said.

It wasn’t until 2018, while working for the Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center, that Travis’ future career path would really start moving forward. She was introduced to the president and founder of the TAPS program and the director of its women’s empowerment program.

“Unbeknownst to me, my executive director’s wife had told them my story,” she said “Mind you, it’s not a story that too many people know. It’s not exactly normal behavior to introduce yourself on the playground with, ‘Hi my name is Katie and my boyfriend died by suicide x amount of years ago.’ I was working with a newly widowed Army spouse at the time and asking the ladies about the seminar they had coming up that weekend in Denver, Erin (with the women’s empowerment program) asked why I wasn’t coming up myself and I replied something along the lines of, ‘Well, I was JUST his girlfriend.’ Erin took my hands and said, ‘We don’t use that word, just.’ And then they basically made my executive director allow me to take a half-day on Friday so that I could drive up to Denver for the seminar.”

From there, Travis spent years working to obtain her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and doing internships and field work, all while working full-time.

“When things settled down for me, I decided to give back and become a peer mentor for TAPS,” she said. “I started exploring the TAPS website after completing my volunteer application and discovered they were hiring. The rest is history.”

In February, Travis moved to Warren County and began researching resources available in the area. That’s when she discovered the Schorman Center.

“After meeting with the team, I was asked if I’d like to come onboard as a grief counselor,” she said.

Travis has a master’s degree in social work, spent more than ten years working with military children at Fort Carson, worked at the Mt. Carmel Veteran services center in COlorado Springs, Colorado, running the veteran and family resource department and has been working with TAPS for just under two years.