The grandparents no one asks about

Kristi Estrada, LPC, NCC, ACS, SEP

Submitted photo/kristiestrada.com

When someone dies, we know what to do. There is a service. People bring food. Neighbors say the person’s name out loud. The loss has a shape, and the shape gives everyone else a way to help. This loss has no shape.”

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OPINION — There is a photograph on a refrigerator in Sun City that stopped updating four years ago. The child in the photo is 9. She is 13 now. Her grandmother knows this because she counts.

As a licensed counselor in Phoenix, much of my work is with families after a rupture. Some of the people I sit with are adult children who stepped away from a parent, and stepping away saved them. I want to say that first and plainly, because it is often the whole story. There are families where distance is the only honest answer. The person who chose it does not owe anyone an explanation.

This isn’t for them or about them. It’s for the people in the other chair.

Family estrangement is more common than most people assume. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s national survey found more than 1 in 4 Americans reporting a current estrangement from a relative. What those numbers do not show is who else is standing inside them. When a parent and an adult child stop speaking, a grandparent frequently loses the grandchildren, too, without being the person the rupture was about, and often without being told what happened.

I meet these grandparents in the Valley constantly. They come to a first appointment for something else — sleep, blood pressure, a general heaviness — and it takes most of the hour to arrive at the real sentence.

Here’s what makes this particular grief so hard to carry.

When someone dies, we know what to do. There is a service. People bring food. Neighbors say the person’s name out loud. The loss has a shape, and the shape gives everyone else a way to help.

This loss has no shape. There is no service for a grandchild who is alive and 40 minutes away. There is no casserole. Most people never learn it happened, and the ones who do learn tend to go quiet, because they assume that asking would be prying, or because they suspect there is a version of the story they have not heard and do not want to choose sides.

So, the grandparent stops mentioning it. And a grief nobody asks about does not fade. It goes underground and comes out somewhere else — as insomnia, as irritability, as a slow withdrawal from the people who are still here.

I want to offer one idea that I have watched change things for people in this position —repair is not reunion.

Repair can happen with someone who will not participate, who refuses, who is unsafe or who has died. It is an internal completion before it is a transaction. It does not require the other person to pick up the phone. It cannot be vetoed by anyone.

What that looks like in ordinary life is not dramatic:

• It looks like telling one trusted person the truth of it, out loud, in full, without editing for who might hear.

• It looks like writing the letters you do not send, and keeping them.

• It looks like putting away the birthday gifts you would have given, in a box, dated. Not as a plan. As a record that you did not stop.

• It looks like taking an honest inventory of your own part, without collapsing into it, because shame does not produce change in anybody.

• And it looks like refusing to recruit. Every relative you enlist to argue your case is one more door your grandchild would have to walk back through someday.

None of this restores what was lost. I would not tell you otherwise. But it moves you from waiting to living, and those are very different ways to spend a decade.

Nothing is wrong with you. Something in you has been trying to protect you from a loss with no place to put itself.

Keep the box. Keep the letters. Keep the photograph on the refrigerator.

And keep the light on.

Kristi Estrada, LPC, NCC, ACS, SEP is a licensed professional counselor, board-approved clinical supervisor,  a somatic experiencing practitioner and author of “Your Pattern Made Sense.” Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.