A Love Like No Other. A Loss Like No Other.

The Unimaginable Pain of Grandparent Alienation

By Lisa Franco Alexander

A grandmother responded today to something I had written about grandparent alienation, with four simple words:

“It is so cruel.”

I knew exactly what she meant. There was no explanation necessary. No background story required. No need for her to convince me that what she was experiencing was unbearable.

I answered her almost instinctively:

There is no pain like this. None.

And then I realized something. There is only one way I know to begin explaining the devastation of losing a grandchild who is still alive.

First, I have to explain the love.

The Love You Never Knew Existed

Before you have a grandchild, people try to tell you. Just wait. There's nothing like it. Being a grandparent is different.

You smile. You believe them.

But you don't understand.

How could you?

There is no adequate way to explain a love you have never experienced.

Then that child arrives, and something happens inside you that you were completely unprepared for. You are ecstatic. Overjoyed. Elated. Blissful. Absolutely, ridiculously, deliriously in love with this tiny human being.

You stare at fingers. Toes. Eyelashes. You study a little face as though no baby has ever possessed a face before. And you are quite certain that although billions of babies have been born throughout human history, none of them has ever been quite as extraordinary as this one.

And then comes the first time those little arms reach specifically for you.

Not because someone handed them to you. Not because you reached first.

They chose you.

Those tiny arms stretch toward you because they know you. They want you. They have learned that your arms are one of the places where they belong.

And when they finally say your name—

Grammie.

Something inside you melts all over again.

Babies learn us in ways that have nothing to do with words. They know our voices. Our touch. Our smell. The feeling of being held against us. The energy we bring into a room.

I cared for my first grandson during the first two weeks of his life. Then circumstances kept us apart for nearly two years. I wondered what would happen when I finally walked through the door again.

Would he know me?

He was a little boy who usually kept his distance from people he didn't know well. But there was no hesitation. He came to me and attached himself to me as though those two years had somehow disappeared.

He knew me.

Maybe it was my voice. Maybe my smell. Maybe something about my touch or the feeling of being near me had remained somewhere inside him. I cannot scientifically explain what he remembered. I only know what happened.

My grandson knew his Grammie.

Suddenly, rolling over is headline news. A first step is a major event. A new word deserves an announcement. You find yourself telling people things that would sound utterly ridiculous coming from anyone else because, somehow, every tiny accomplishment feels monumental.

She rolled over! He said Grammie! She took three steps! He knows who I am!

And somehow each one feels monumental.

You have loved before. Of course you have. You have loved parents, siblings, partners, friends. If you have children, you already know the ferocious, consuming love of being a parent.

And then comes this.

A grandchild. A new generation. Your child's child.

Suddenly there is another chamber inside your heart that you did not know existed.

And it opens.

You Don't Just Love Them. You Fall in Love With Their Future.

Perhaps this is part of what people who have never had grandchildren cannot understand. You don't simply love the child standing in front of you.

You begin loving all the tomorrows too.

Birthdays that haven't happened yet, Christmas mornings, school concerts, soccer games, hockey games, dance recitals, graduations, first loves, weddings, family dinners and ordinary Sunday afternoons.

You imagine watching them grow taller. You wonder who they will become.

And without even realizing it, you begin making quiet promises to the future.

I'll teach them this.

We'll do this every Christmas.

Someday I'll tell them about...

I wonder what they'll be like when they're sixteen.

You aren't making plans for a visit.

You are imagining a lifetime.

You picture yourself older, sitting somewhere with this person who once fit into your arms, laughing about something they did when they were six.

You begin collecting memories before you even realize you are doing it: photographs, drawings, birthday cards, voicemails, little sayings, inside jokes, traditions nobody else would understand, the sound of their laughter.

The particular way they say your name.

Grammie. Grandma. Nana. Papa. Grandpa. Avó. Avô. Tutu. Nonna.

Whatever name they gave you becomes one of the most beautiful sounds you have ever heard.

Because eventually it becomes more than a name.

It means you.

And Then They Are Gone

Not dead.

Gone.

There may be no funeral. No obituary. No casseroles arriving at your door. No sympathy cards. No gathering of people acknowledging that something precious has been ripped out of your life.

The child is alive.

Perhaps living twenty minutes away. Perhaps celebrating birthdays you cannot attend. Perhaps starting school, losing their first tooth, doing their first flip in gymnastics, winning their first swim meet, scoring their first goal, hitting their first home run, going to their first dance or graduating from one grade to the next.

Growing taller. Changing.

Becoming someone.

And you are not there.

You don't get the breathless phone call. You don't get the photograph. You don't get to clap from the bleachers. You don't get to say, “I knew you could do it.”

Sometimes you don't even know it happened.

The future you unconsciously believed belonged to both of you has been obliterated. The relationship has been severed. The rituals have been abolished. The ordinary moments have vanished. And the role that had become woven into your identity has been ripped away.

You aren't simply sad. You are devastated, shattered, ravaged by a loss the world often does not even recognize as grief. Your heart feels demolished. Your sense of family can feel wrecked. Your identity can feel smashed into pieces.

And sometimes the longing becomes so consuming that it seems to swallow everything else in the room.

Because the child you are grieving still exists..

The Cruelest Mirror

And this is what struck me when I responded to that grandmother.

The pain mirrors the love.

Before my grandchildren came into my life, I could not possibly have understood how much I would love them. People could describe it. I could listen. I could imagine.

But until I experienced it myself, I didn't know.

And grandparent alienation is the terrible mirror image of that discovery.

If you have never experienced it, I can describe the pain to you. I can tell you that it is excruciating. I can tell you that it is relentless. I can tell you that it can leave a grandparent emotionally annihilated, overwhelmed by longing, consumed by unanswered questions and desperate for one more ordinary moment.

I can tell you what it feels like when a photograph appears unexpectedly; when somebody asks how many grandchildren you have; when another grandparent casually complains that the grandchildren are coming over again this weekend.

I can tell you what it feels like when Mother's Day arrives. When Christmas arrives. When their birthdays arrive. When your birthday arrives.

When you realize another year of their childhood has disappeared and you can never get it back.

I can tell you all of that.

But words still fail.

Because just as you cannot fully understand the ecstasy of that love until a grandchild enters your heart, you cannot fully understand the agony of its forced absence until that child is removed from your life.

A love you could never have imagined.

A loss you could never have imagined.

The same heart discovers both.

Childhood Does Not Wait for Reconciliation

This is one of the most brutal realities of grandparent alienation.

Time does not stop while adults work things out.

Childhood keeps moving.

A six-year-old becomes seven. Then eight. Then nine. The little voice changes. The missing teeth grow back. The favorite stuffed animal disappears. The child who once climbed into your lap becomes too big to carry.

And the grandparent knows it.

That knowledge can be merciless.

Because even if reconciliation eventually comes, there is no doorway back into those missing years. You cannot reclaim the Christmas morning you missed. You cannot attend the recital that happened three years ago. You cannot hear the first word you weren't there to hear. You cannot return to the birthday when they blew out eight candles and you were somewhere else wondering whether they remembered you.

Those moments have been eradicated from the relationship forever.

There may be new memories someday. There may be healing. There may even be reconciliation.

But there is no recovering a childhood after it has passed.

And What About the Grandchildren We Have Never Met?

There is another grief within grandparent alienation that is almost impossible to explain.

Sometimes another grandchild is born after the estrangement has already begun.

Somewhere in the world is a child who carries your family within them.

Your grandchild.

And you have never held them.

You don't know the weight of their newborn body against your chest. You don't know the smell of their hair. You weren't there for the first smile. You never heard the first laugh. They have never reached their arms toward you. They have never called you Grammie. Grandma. Nana. Papa. Grandpa.

Perhaps they don't even know who you are.

And you find yourself asking questions no grandparent ever imagines having to ask:

Will I ever meet you?

Will I ever hold you?

Will you ever know that I loved you before I even knew the sound of your voice?

This is a peculiar kind of grief. You are mourning memories you were never allowed to make. You are grieving firsts that happened without you. You are missing someone you have never met—and somehow, impossibly, you already love them.

There is no photograph together to hold. No remembered hug. No little voice in your memory saying your name.

Only the knowledge:

You are my grandchild. And I am your grandparent.

Yet we are strangers.

Not because I chose to be.

That is a loss like no other, too.

And Still, You Are Their Grandparent

This may be one of the strangest parts of all.

The relationship disappears from your daily life.

But the love does not receive the message.

Your heart does not understand access. It does not understand blocked telephone numbers. It does not understand family disputes. It does not understand social media. It does not understand who said what to whom.

It simply knows:

That is my grandchild.

You still wonder whether they are safe, whether they are happy, whether they are struggling, whether they remember you, whether somebody tells them stories about you, whether they still have the things you gave them, whether they ever wonder where you went.

Whether they think you left them.

That last question can be particularly devastating.

Because you didn't stop loving them. You didn't wake up one morning and decide you were finished being their grandparent.

You did not withdraw your love.

You simply lost the ability to deliver it.

And so all that love remains.

With nowhere to go.

Why “Move On” Can Feel So Brutal

People mean well. They want the suffering to end.

You have to move forward. You can't let this ruin your life. Maybe someday they'll come back. Try not to think about it.

But imagine saying that to someone about one of the greatest loves of their life.

Because that is what a grandchild can be.

You don't “get over” loving them. You don't eradicate them from your heart because remembering hurts. You don't abolish a relationship internally simply because someone else has abolished it externally.

The task is not to stop loving.

The task is learning how to survive while loving: how to carry an enormous love that no longer has its familiar destination; how to build a meaningful life while acknowledging the empty chair; how to laugh without guilt; how to experience joy without believing you have betrayed your grief; how to remember without allowing memory to consume every remaining piece of your life; how to remain whole when something inside you feels utterly shattered.

That is different from moving on.

It is learning to live alongside an unbearable truth.

There Is No Pain Like This. None.

I know those words are strong.

I mean them to be.

Not because grandparent alienation is the only devastating loss a human being can experience. Human beings endure unimaginable tragedies, and grief should never become a competition.

I say it because this particular grief has its own terrible architecture.

The person is alive. The love remains. The relationship is inaccessible. The future you imagined has been demolished. There is often no socially recognized ritual for mourning.

And the world continues as though nothing died.

Yet something did.

A relationship. A role. A future. A thousand ordinary moments that were supposed to happen.

That is why a grandmother can write simply, “It is so cruel.”

And another grandmother understands everything contained inside those four words.

No explanation required.

The Love Was Real. It Still Is.

If you are an alienated grandparent reading this, I cannot promise you reconciliation.

I will not tell you that everything happens for a reason. I will not tell you simply to move on. And I will never tell you that you should stop loving your grandchildren because loving them hurts.

I will tell you something else.

The depth of your grief does not make you weak. It tells a story about the depth of the bond you experienced.

You once discovered a love so enormous that you did not know the human heart was capable of containing it.

Now you are discovering how much it hurts when that same enormous love has nowhere to land.

There may be days when you feel broken. Days when you feel demolished. Days when the absence overwhelms you. Days when you wonder whether the person you were before this happened still exists.

But underneath the devastation, something remains untouched.

The love.

Someone else may control access. Someone else may control photographs. Someone else may control phone calls, visits, holidays, birthdays, and information.

But nobody can reach inside you and abolish the love that made you their grandparent.

That belongs to you.

Perhaps that is why both sides of this experience defy language.

The joy was too enormous to imagine before you knew it.

The pain was too enormous to imagine before you knew it.

A love like no other.

A loss like no other.

And if that is your story too, you do not have to explain it to me.

Come and sit beside me.

I understand.

Lisa Franco Alexander

Founder, Heart’s Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

Rediscover Peace. Purpose. Wholeness.