By: Natalie Johnson
Emilio Parga’s Monday might start in an elementary school classroom and end on a call with a professional sports program. The subject is the same in both rooms. Somebody died, and the people left behind are trying to keep performing.
Parga is a sports and performance thanatologist, one of the few specialists in the country applying the study of death and bereavement to athletes and performers. He is also the founder and executive director of The Solace Tree, the Reno nonprofit that has supported grieving children, teens and families for more than two decades, and that now partners with K-12 schools, universities, healthcare organizations, businesses and athletic teams.
The sports side of his work is getting national attention because the problem it names has gone unexamined for so long. Athlete grief is common, quiet, and almost completely unsupported.
“Grief doesn’t follow sport’s rules, and there is no magic ending to grief,” Parga says.
Sport culture is built on emotional control. Athletes are trained to compartmentalize, to perform on schedule, to treat distress as a thing you push through. Grief breaks every one of those rules. It arrives without a timeline, resurfaces without warning, and refuses to be outworked. An athlete who treats it like an opponent loses.
Parga’s expertise was featured this year in Psychology Today, where he described how grief hides inside performance. It shows up as fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, and emotional swings. One athlete buries themselves in training. Another cannot focus at all. Both are grieving, and both may conclude from the locker room’s silence that they should keep it to themselves. Losses connected to suicide carry an extra layer of silence, which makes open and direct conversation matter even more.
The field is starting to organize around the problem, in part because Parga built it a home. He created the Death, Trauma, and Informed Grief Special Interest Group within the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, giving researchers and practitioners a dedicated space inside the profession for the first time.
What makes Parga’s vantage point unusual is the range beneath it. He has spent over twenty years sitting with grieving six-year-olds, and he brings what they taught him into rooms with adult professionals. The lessons barely change. People in grief need acknowledgment, not solutions. They need to know their version of grieving is normal. They need the people around them to stop waiting for them to be done.
Strength, in his framing, gets redefined. It is not moving on quickly or forgetting. It is honesty about the loss and staying connected to the people who can help carry it.
The Solace Tree grew out of the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when Parga saw that children in his region had nowhere to take their grief. Two decades later, the organization’s mission runs in both directions at once, supporting families through the worst weeks of their lives while teaching schools, companies, and teams the skill Parga calls grief literacy.
His current push aims at the youth sports pipeline. He is developing a mental health camp for young athletes along with grief literacy training for coaches and parents, so the adults closest to kids know how to respond to loss before they’re forced to improvise.
The ambition behind all of it is bigger than sports. Parga is trying to retire the idea that grief is a private malfunction to be hidden, in locker rooms or anywhere else. Millions of American children will lose a parent or sibling before adulthood. They grow up into athletes, employees, and leaders. The grief comes with them.
The question Parga keeps putting in front of institutions is simple. They can plan for it, or they can keep being surprised by it.
