BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

What Christy Hughes remembers about her first visit to Fernside was that there was pizza and everyone looked happy. It was not what she expected from a center for grieving children.

She was 10 years old. Six months earlier, her father had been killed by a drunk driver. She had tried putting on a cheerful face, and holding back the tears. What she needed was somewhere to grieve.

Over the next year, Fernside became that place, where it was safe to cry, laugh, get mad and admit one's darkest fears.

''At school I felt really separated from the other kids,'' she says eight years later. ''I felt a lot older. At Fernside, I met kids I could talk to and relate to. It was a breakthrough to be able to cry, to know it wasn't a bad thing.''

Fernside's greatest gift, she says, was letting her know ''there could be a time when I was OK.''

This month Fernside Center for Grieving Children in Norwood observes its 10th anniversary, a proud but relatively quiet milestone for an institution that has changed the character of Greater Cincinnati.

Awards and titles come and go. Dubious national rankings make Cincinnati a star for a day. But it is places such as Fernside that tell us who we really are.

Here, children are allowed to hurt, and to expect to find help. Here adults will stop along their own paths to help a child find his way. Here life is far too rich and full and honest to deny the painful parts of it.

In its compassion and resiliency, Fernside embodies the best of Cincinnati.

Out of death, a beginning

Rachel Burrell, a gentle and sensitive woman, gave birth to Fernside out of the death of her son David. When he died at age 27, his brother Christopher needed a place to mourn. But there was nothing here. So in December 1986, Mrs. Burrell opened Fernside.

''I just wanted it to stand testimony to the grieving child among us, that we acknowledged her presence,'' Mrs. Burrell says softly. ''Children always grieved. They just didn't have a place to go.''

In the 10 years since then, 3,000 grieving children ages 4 to 18 have found that place in Fernside. At the heart of the program are groups that meet twice monthly, arranged by age and sometimes by the nature of the relative's death. Then there are workshops for teachers, summer camps for the children and publications on grief and mourning.

Grief is not a bad word at Fernside. It is a real word. Sad children are not tolerated, avoided or falsely encouraged. They are loved and listened to.

For most of us, it is not a natural instinct. ''Nobody wants to see a suffering child,'' Mrs. Burrell says. So we shush them, distract them, discourage their tears and urge them kindly but firmly to ''get over it.''

But at Fernside, grieving children learn one of life's most awesome, painful and triumphant truths: Human love does not end with human life.

How magnificent, if also tragic, that we never get over someone we love.

Loss turns to lesson

It is a lesson that changes lives. And as each of those small lives change - grow stronger and wiser, dare to care again - they change the character of this city.

Who would have thought that a place that knows how to mourn also knows how to live most fully?

Without Fernside, would we ever have learned that loss, once understood, is never loss again, but evidence of all we have been lucky enough to experience?

Rachel Burrell understands the nature of loss. Fourteen years after her son's death, she is still sad. She still misses him, and always will. But she has found a secret inside the sadness. Acknowledging another's pain lessens one's own.

She moves softly through the Zion United Church of Christ, where Fernside programs are held. On the walls are guidelines developed by each support group of children. ''No Spitting,'' reads one. ''It's OK to pass,'' reads another. A third says, ''It's OK to cry and it's OK to laugh.''

Mrs. Burrell smiles.

''It is such a sad thing to go through, but they also know so much more of what it is to be here, to be alive,'' she says gently. ''It is a mixture of joy and sadness, of having and loving, and having to give something up.''

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.