Dr. Marie Odile Réthoré sees different parents every day in her clinic for children and young people with genetic illnesses and disabilities. Yet sometimes it is a grandparent who brings a grandchild to see her. Now and then she receives a phone call that reveals a grandmother's worry and despair...
I cannot forget the grandfather who asked to see me urgently to talk about his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, who had a mental disability. "Stefania is doing well," he told me, "but her mother is falling apart. There are so many problems. How can we help her?" As I listened to this man—who had come to Paris between two trains just to speak with me—I realized that what he really could not bear any longer were the questions that had gone unanswered for seventeen years. He needed, urgently, to talk about it with someone who understood.
The Courage to Speak
It is true: grandparents often suffer more than anyone else. They await the birth of a grandchild with great hope, eager to share with them a new vital force. This grandchild will ensure continuity by carrying forward the family's heritage after they are gone.
Then the dream breaks suddenly. They watch their own children despair, troubled and in turmoil. They feel helpless, useless. They lack even the courage to speak to their children, to face these problems together, to offer help. They fear intruding, reopening old wounds by speaking of them, complicating the couple's life.
Some wait to be asked. When they are not, they withdraw into themselves, full of anguish—sometimes bitter resentment. Others convince themselves that any attempt to help is futile. They feel they have become too heavy a burden for their children, who have problems enough. Some, wounded too deeply by something they believe should happen to others alone, rush to advise placing the child in an institution "before he tips the balance of the marriage, ruins the parents' careers, or jeopardizes the futures of his siblings." A few even suggest that giving up the child might be best: an adoptive family, they say, could welcome and love him better.
Yet in most cases, grandparents are wonderful—tender and capable, courageous and ready to embrace. They know how to be present when needed, but also know when to look away and stay quiet. They know the right word to say at the right moment, always with gentleness and without judgment.
Many come to my clinic, hold the children on their knees, and keep them occupied so the parents can talk freely. But this task does not stop them from listening, and I can read in their eyes the questions they do not dare ask aloud.
In most cases, grandparents are wonderful—tender and capable, courageous and ready to embrace.
In most cases, grandparents are wonderful—tender and capable, courageous and ready to embrace.What They Can Offer
For us doctors, this is the moment to answer those unspoken questions, to provide accurate information, to gently correct mistaken ideas.
I remember one grandfather who said: "You doctors can call it what you like, but at the end of the day, these children are a curse."
Such extreme attitudes in grandparents can spring from an anxious need to intervene and protect, or from distance born of shyness and fear. This is the moment to suggest books or magazines that might help them—resources their children don't have time to read—though grandparents should take care not to show off their newfound knowledge to their adult children later. Everyone has something different to offer.
We can encourage grandparents to have their grandchildren visit if they feel able, approaching the parents gently with the idea and arranging to receive them as well as possible.
Parents must be able to rely on their grandparents—on their knowledge of life and sorrow, on their capacity to give their heart to a grandchild who will never forget them.
Milena, whom I saw some time ago, still laughs at the stories her grandfather used to tell her. Now she is thirty and spends her days running errands for her grandparents, who are quite elderly. She will grieve deeply when they die: as for many, their death will be her first encounter with loss, and she must be prepared for that separation... If I judge by the confidences I have received, they are no more handicapped than we are when facing the mystery of death.
It is not easy to have a disabled brother or sister. Many young people lack the courage to speak about it with their parents for various reasons. Some are jealous, some ashamed... It is far easier to talk about all of this alone, on a walk with grandfather or over a good snack with grandmother.
I know well the suffering, and sometimes the despair, of many grandparents. But I also know their patience and their tenderness. They have loved and suffered so much already that they will find, day by day, the strength of a word or a gesture that allows them to walk forward again.
- Marie Odile Réthoré, 1997 - from Ombres et Lumières no. 116)