'Like the clouds parted': At a Cave Creek haven, horses bring peace to grieving families

CAVE CREEK — As Mary Derrig approached the horse yard, she felt a sense of peace.

The yard, a patch of hard-packed earth with a towering saguaro at its center, was tucked behind a sprawling property along a dirt road in Cave Creek. Derrig had driven there from Anthem, a community north of Phoenix, in the hope of finding her 9-year-old granddaughter a place to heal.

Not yet in fourth grade, the girl has lost both her parents. Her dad, Derrig’s son, died by suicide in 2017, and her mom died in March this year. In between the two tragedies, the family suffered a third loss, Derrig’s husband, to lung cancer.

Now, her granddaughter’s legal guardian, Derrig, is trying to keep the two of them afloat in a sea of grief.

She first heard about the horses from a friend at a dog park. Derrig was open to anything that would help, but this sounded especially promising because her granddaughter loved animals. She brought it up with her, hoping for a rare "yes."

“She said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,'" Derrig said. “Which is a big deal because she hasn’t been wanting to do a lot of stuff.”

They ventured to Cave Creek on a warm May evening. In the car on the way there, Derrig’s granddaughter was quiet, her mood low.

When they arrived, they were greeted by the program operator, a woman named Megan MacIntosh.

At a picnic table by the arena, MacIntosh led the two of them through a relaxation exercise. She encouraged them to take a deep breath and feel as centered and present as possible.

Once they were feeling grounded, they went to see the horses lined up in stalls along the yard. There was Arly, a 15-year-old mare. Pongo, his coarse white hair flecked with black. Lady, 16 hands high. There were ponies too, two white and one brown, the three of them sharing a stall.

Derrig’s granddaughter clutched onto her grandmother’s hand, a hallmark of the severe separation anxiety she had experienced since her mom died. Derrig could tell she was a little afraid of the powerful animals.

But as the sun set over the arena, the tranquil atmosphere felt like a balm for their anxieties. With MacIntosh’s gentle guidance, her granddaughter braved the horses and even tried brushing one.

And on the way home, she couldn’t stop talking.

Grief is 'like love'

MacIntosh is intimately acquainted with grief.

Her 18-year-old son, Chase, was a budding astrophotographer who captured scenes from the cosmos on his telescope and iPhone and posted them with pride on Instagram. He was convinced he would go to Mars one day, fascinated by the unexplored mysteries of the universe.

“I think Earth was a little boring to him,” MacIntosh said. “I think he wanted to experience something a little more spectacular.”

Chase died in 2021 after taking a counterfeit pill that contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. In the years since, MacIntosh has learned that grief is more alive than people think, more complex and expansive than a period of mourning.

“Grief is …” MacIntosh paused to think. “It's like love. It's every single day.”

And every single day, she navigates not only her own grief but that of her three other children.

Chase doted on his little sister, Sadie. In 8th grade, he asked MacIntosh to bring her to school so he could show off his 2-year-old sister in the cafeteria and take her into art class.

The night he died, Sadie, then 7, shut down. After police arrived on the doorstep to deliver the awful news, she barred herself in her mom’s bathroom and screamed on repeat: “No one say anything. Don’t say it. Don’t talk, don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it.”

She couldn’t bear hearing what had happened to Chase. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. But she certainly felt it, a grief so huge it was overwhelming. MacIntosh took her to traditional therapy, but it didn’t seem to help Sadie process her loss.

After about six months, they tried a therapist who worked with horses.

“It was like these clouds just parted,” MacIntosh said.

Something about the horse’s aura helped Sadie feel safe to open up. She would write letters to Chase and read them to the horse. Sometimes, she’d draw pictures of her brother or pictures that represented her feelings or just sit and be in the horse’s presence.

“They're not going to weigh in in the way a therapist would, or try and guide it in a certain way or try to pull anything out of her that she wasn't ready to give,” MacIntosh said. “They just hold space. And it was so powerful.”

The experience inspired MacIntosh, a longtime yoga teacher and sound healer, to learn more about equine-assisted therapy and eventually open her own grief support program.

It was a leap of faith for MacIntosh, who admits she knew little about horses before 2021. But she was convinced this kind of program could help other families in the same way it transformed Sadie.

In 2022, she and her husband traded their house in Scottsdale — which boasted such amenities as a paved road, a sidewalk and a school bus route — for a Cave Creek property with space for six horses. MacIntosh knew it was the place when she noticed the name of the street: Calle de las Estrellas, or Street of the Stars.

In January, her free grief support program, the Godspeed Project , officially opened.

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Horses 'a mirror' of mood

The second time Derrig took her granddaughter to Cave Creek, there was a major development. Her granddaughter permitted her to wait by the picnic table while she went off with MacIntosh to see the horses.

Derrig was over the moon. As she watched them go, MacIntosh looked back at her, and the two adults met eyes in a silent celebration.

Derrig praised MacIntosh for being able to set her granddaughter at ease. “So patient. So kind, so caring,” she said. “I mean, it was totally genuine. There’s no doubt.”

“She just let my granddaughter lead, and do what she was comfortable with and really respected her. What she was going through. And really understood.”

MacIntosh has a certificate in equine-assisted learning from the EAL Academy and is also a certified grief educator and trauma-informed yoga instructor. She is not a psychologist or counselor, and the Godspeed Project, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that relies on donations to continue its work, is not intended as a replacement for traditional therapy.

Her work there draws heavily on the concept of mindfulness, which is about being present and able to observe one’s thoughts and emotions without judgment.

As MacIntosh sees it, horses are suited to this kind of work because they not only embody mindfulness but also, by their nature, encourage people to step into the same mindset when interacting with them.

As prey animals, she said, horses have a “heightened sense of awareness.”

“So they are only in the present moment. If they were to be daydreaming about yesterday or stressing about tomorrow, they would be putting themselves and their herd animals at risk.”

They are also peaceful and perceptive, sensitive to agitation in the humans around them. That’s why MacIntosh starts off with breathing exercises, or guided meditation or a wiggle session with young kids, to help her clients enter a relaxed state.

“Because horses communicate with body language, so when they're happy, their body language does one thing," she said. "When they're not when they're stressed, their body language does something else.

“And that can kind of give the person a mirror. ‘Oh, I might be showing up not great because the horse's ears are pinned, or it keeps swishing me with its tail.’ So what do I need to do now, in this moment, to change my energy, to have a better connection with this animal?”

To stay safe around horses requires significant focus, MacIntosh said, drawing people out of their anguish and into the here and now.

“You really need to be present,” she said. “Knowing that there's this reward when you connect when you feel this energy between you and the horse. And it’s so powerful.”

She keeps sessions loose depending on what the client needs. She recalled a woman whose partner had died by suicide, who asked: “All I want to do is stand by one. Is that OK?”

“I'm like, ‘Absolutely,'" MacIntosh said. “And she’s like, ‘Can you not talk to me?’ and I was like, ‘Yes, of course I can not talk to you.'"

The woman stood with a horse for about 25 minutes. Then she painted a rock — clients, if they so choose, can also do an art project in honor of their lost one — and lingered by the arena for hours as she worked on it, which was fine by MacIntosh. Flexibility is a feature, not a bug.

“She needed a space to go,” she said. “She needed a space to be by herself.”

Those who had sought out the Godspeed Project run the gamut of grief. MacIntosh has worked with people who have lost their child, husband, wife, parent, sibling, niece, or nephew, the deaths occurring in a variety of ways. She also welcomes those experiencing different kinds of grief: cancer patients grieving a diagnosis and the parents of neurodivergent children grieving the lives they had anticipated. She has worked with grandmothers like Derrig, now caring for grandchildren after their parents passed.

In the fall, the Godspeed Project will partner with Hospice of the Valley, which runs grief programs through the New Song Center for Grieving Children.

But it isn’t for everybody. As part of her intake process, MacIntosh assesses if people need help beyond what she can offer and may encourage them to seek out a medical professional or inpatient program instead.

She sees herself as a “connector,” the link between a grieving person and something that could help them navigate their loss.

“I think as a grieving parent, raising grieving children, I think I'm also a peer,” she said. “And that's helpful for a lot of people. Just like if you were struggling with a terminal illness, you wouldn't want to go talk to someone who is doing CrossFit.

“You'd want to talk to someone going through what you're going through.”

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The inequities of grief

When Laine Munir met MacIntosh, she felt the unique bond that exists between bereaved parents.

“When you meet, you hug, you look each other in the eye and you acknowledge each other’s pain,” she said. “And you don’t start off a conversation saying, how are you? Because we already know the answer to that.”

Munir was born and raised in Phoenix but left Arizona for the Peace Corps in Mozambique when she was 21. She spent the next two decades living all over the world, with stints in Nigeria, Italy, New York and South Korea, where she and her husband had twin boys, Ayaan and Emil.

At the end of 2022, the family was living in Kigali, Rwanda, and preparing to move to Arizona, where Munir had accepted a job as a professor at Arizona State University.

Then Ayaan fell ill.

It was a sudden, devastating decline. The bright preschooler, who Munir likened to a playground diplomat with his peaceful nature and knack for bringing people together, had glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer with no known cure. He was medically evacuated to Kenya for better care but died six days later.

The flight to Arizona, meant to symbolize a new chapter for the family, ended up being a journey to lay Ayaan to rest and then to navigate the wilderness of grief.

“It takes over your identity,” Munir said, of losing a child. “You almost can’t have a conversation about anything else.”

There is a particular agony to losing a twin, she said.

“All of these beautiful milestones that make parenting worth it become a little bit more complex and, at times, a little bit more tortured,” she said. “And we have to, people who have lost one of their twins have to work extra hard at separating their children's identity to ensure that their child's death doesn't eclipse their present child's life.”

In the wake of Ayaan’s death, she also felt intensely lonely. The social world had been cleaved in two, one half inhabited by those who had lost a child and the other by those who had not.

Munir’s isolation was compounded by being back in Phoenix after so long away. A place that should have felt familiar had grown foreign with distance and time. Munir struggled to read a room and grasp the nuances of her social interactions. A trip to the supermarket or gym could become overwhelming.

“Some of that is a symptom of grief from traumatic child loss. Some of that is reverse culture shock, right? And some of that is just exhaustion from being a working parent.”

Munir hadn’t officially started at ASU when Ayaan died, but the university offered her months of bereavement leave and then a transition to online teaching.

There was no hit to her income at all, and Munir was grateful. But she also couldn’t help but think of all the people who were going through the same anguish she was without an accommodating employer.

“What is someone who isn't in a white collar job supposed to do?” she said. “What is someone in the service industry who lives on tips supposed to do if they need to stay home in grief? What is someone who works for minimum wage supposed to do if they need to stay home and grieve?”

The more she thought about it, the more two things became apparent: One, there is a significant socio-economic dimension to child loss, and two, this field of research was under-explored.

She has since pivoted to study the economics of child loss, looking at how it affects things like household income, gender dynamics and the level of education a sibling might attain.

“These are very relevant questions to American families today,” she said, “and we don’t have a lot of data on that.”

Munir said free support services like the Godspeed Project and New Song Center fill a crucial gap, but more substantial change is needed.

She cited bereavement protections written into state and federal law, as well as better access to affordable mental health services, as examples of social policy that could help.

“There is a basic human right to a mourning period, especially when you lose your child,” she said. “It is inhumane to not have written policies that protect our human right to a mourning period.”

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Moving, not moving on

The Godspeed Project keeps MacIntosh moving.

It offers purpose, gets her outside and talking to people and helps steer her away from drowning in her unrelenting grief. But it is not, she said, a distraction.

“Some people would be like, ‘Oh, you're just distracting yourself,’” she said. “Heck no, I'm not. I'm moving the energy of this. I cannot stew in this. So, coming out at 5 a.m. and mucking stalls is not a diversion. It's cathartic.”

Her clients keep themselves moving too, albeit in different ways.

For Munir, it is her research. She feels a duty to make Arizona and the U.S. a more supportive place for grieving parents. This drive is partly borne from her educational privilege, Munir said, and partly a way “to understand my own despair.”

It’s also about the prayer she starts each day with when she first opens her eyes.

“That I find the strength to live a life that would make Ayaan proud of me,” she said. “And that I honor his life by trying to ease the suffering of other people who've lost a child.”

For Derrig, it is focusing on her granddaughter. The girl’s late parents both had mental health issues, and Derrig is determined to wrap her in support, both to address her trauma and as an early intervention.

“Any therapy I can get her, I’m getting her,” she said.

The fact the Godspeed Project is free has been immensely helpful. As a ward of the state, her granddaughter receives Medicaid, but waitlists are long, and Derrig is currently paying out of pocket for therapy. It’s a strain, she said — especially coupled with the unexpected costs of raising a child at this point in her life — but one she can thankfully manage.

Experiencing so much loss has made life feel precious. She tries to remember that, to cherish every moment. But it’s still tough to bear her own immense grief while caring for her granddaughter.

“It's extremely challenging,” she said, “but it's not about me so much. It's more her.”

'I have hope that she can recover'

In the short time her granddaughter has been working with MacIntosh and the horses, Derrig has witnessed a change.

“New Song was good. The therapist he’s a great guy. And they’re helping,” she said. “But this is the most I’ve seen her respond.”

It has given Derrig an extreme sense of relief. “Because how do you deal with a kid who’s grieving? It makes me feel good because I have hope that she can recover from this.”

It’s good for both of them to be there, her granddaughter bonding with the horses while Derrig basks in the Cave Creek sun, relaxing in the presence of the animals. Sometimes she grooms them.

On their third visit, MacIntosh handed Derrig’s granddaughter a notebook and said, let’s make some lists about the horses.

On the little notepad, the girl enthusiastically jotted down facts about each horse. She noted that Cosmo, one of the ponies, was 36 inches tall and had brothers named Larry and Curly. Pongo was 14.2 hands high and loved kisses and carrots.

For Arly, under the heading “Fun Facts”, she wrote “I love listening. I love helping people.”

In the same session, she led a horse all the way around the yard, completing a full circle by herself.

Watching her, Derrig felt astonished. It was a different girl to the one who had clung to her a few weeks earlier, scared of the horses. Now, she was taking the lead.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Like the clouds parted': At a Cave Creek haven, horses bring peace to grieving families