By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – The attack on the World Trade Center 25 years ago laid the groundwork for an organization that now helps nearly 600 people a week deal with the grief associated with loss.
Today, Sheila Martello, the founding director of Stephy’s Place, a nonprofit grief support center, has expanded the mission beyond the peer support groups she helped build and is working to implement state mandates for grief education in New Jersey classrooms.
In January 2024, then-Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law requiring the state Department of Education adopt grief and loss education in the curriculum for all public-school students in grades 8 through 12. School districts across the state have now implemented grief instruction as part of New Jersey’s Student Learning Standards in Comprehensive Health and Physical Education.
According to the legislation, instruction should include information on the physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms of grief; coping mechanisms and techniques for handling grief and loss; and resources for students, including in-school support, mental health crisis support and individual and group therapy.
“If we can start with the kids and get them more comfortable, maybe they won’t be so mourning avoidant when they get to be adults,” Martello said.
She said the state’s new education mandate builds on the same belief that led to the creation of Stephy’s Place – that grief is not something to avoid but something children can be taught to understand before adulthood inevitably forces the lesson on them.
People think loss is “not going to happen to them. Guess what? It pretty much will happen to everyone,” she said.
Martello said both adults and children are mostly unprepared when loss inevitably comes. But grief is “nothing to be afraid of.” Her focus now is on helping schools move beyond vague sympathy and toward honest, age-appropriate conversations about death, grief and how to support one another.
Teaching the ‘Language of Loss’
To help districts meet the new requirement, she joined forces with Common Ground, a family grief center in Manasquan, a licensed professional counselor and a school assembly group called Lead You. Together, they developed a program built around a play performed by students titled “The Language of Loss.” The production premiered at Manasquan High School in August.
According to Martello, the play is designed to make it easier to talk about loss and also show – rather than lecture – what grief can look like among teenagers: How it manifests in silence and withdrawal, in anger or in awkward attempts to seek comfort.
She hopes “The Language of Loss” will be performed at many schools and give students and staff a shared starting point for discussing death and grief.
Stephy’s Place is one of five organizations listed as part of the New Jersey Grief Collaborative, a coalition of New Jersey’s leading family bereavement centers. The coalition is actively engaged in supporting the state educational mandate in school districts and communities statewide.
Martello added that for families and educators, the collaborative is meant to make it easier to find specialized support, whether for a child’s death, a spouse’s sudden illness or a loss to suicide or overdose.
Remembrance, Responsibility
Stephy’s Place will hold its annual Mourning Walk Sept. 13. Proceeds from the event cover about half of Stephy’s Place’s budget, Martello noted; a gala every five years and private donations cover the rest.
The walk is “a place where everybody can remember their loved one,” she said.
Martello’s husband, James “Jimmy” Martello, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Years later, Kevin Keelan, a priest at Holy Cross Church in Rumson, invited Martello to a support group he started at the church for nearly 22 people whose loved ones died that day. Martello initially turned him down but agreed after he walked her to the meeting himself.
“That’s where I was every Tuesday at 9:30 for the next two to three years,” Martello said. “We forged lots of friendships. We got through.”
The idea for Stephy’s Place came later, when Martello grew close to Stephanie “Stephy” Hardman Kaminoff, a mother of three who was dying of cancer. Martello said Kaminoff always reminded her that “people that die are okay. It’s the people left behind who need the support.” Kaminoff’s words echoed what Martello said her husband told her in a dream years earlier.
Those words gave her the idea for a grief support center, an idea that found immediate acceptance from her church support group, including Elaine Chevalier. Chevalier’s son, Swede Joseph, died on Sept. 11. She offered a space for Stephy’s Place in the Red Bank building she owned.
Stephy’s Place has now grown far beyond what Martello imagined when she and a handful of others first opened a single support room in 2015.
More than a decade later, Stephy’s Place serves hundreds of people a week at no cost, with more than 50 groups organized around specific kinds of loss, including the death of a spouse, a child, a sibling or a parent, as well as losses to suicide and fentanyl poisoning. The center now has 75 trained volunteer facilitators, nearly all of them former participants in the support programs.
As the country prepares for another round of ceremonies and name readings Sept. 11, Martello returns to an idea she shares often with the people who attend her groups.
“When somebody dies, I think that we have two responsibilities,” she said. “One is to never let them be forgotten, and the other is to lead a full life again.”
The article originally appeared in the September 10 – 16, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
