FOR THE GRANDPARENTS WHO WON’T GET A CARD THIS SUNDAY

When Grandparents Day Hurts More Than Anyone Knows

By Lisa Franco Alexander

Tomorrow, families will post photographs.

Grandchildren will make cards with crooked letters and too much glue. There will be phone calls, breakfasts, hugs, flowers and photographs of grandparents surrounded by the little people who made them Grandma, Grandpa, Nana, Nonna, Papa, Grammie, Avó—or whatever beautiful name a child gave them.

And somewhere, a grandparent will see one of those photographs and have to put the phone down. Because tomorrow is Grandparents Day, and they are still a grandparent. They just aren't allowed to be one.

There may be no card or phone call tomorrow. There may be no little arms around their neck, no badly drawn picture destined for the refrigerator, and no small voice calling the name that once became one of their favorite sounds in the world.

For some grandparents, tomorrow won't feel like a celebration.

It will feel like evidence of everything they are missing.

There Is a Particular Kind of Grief in Being a Living Grandparent to Living Grandchildren You Cannot See

The hardest part may be knowing that somewhere, right now, their lives are happening.

Not in the abstract. Today.

They are waking up taller than the last time you saw them. Their faces are changing. Their interests are changing. They are learning things you don't know they learned and telling stories you don't get to hear.

They have new teachers. New friends. New favorite foods. New jokes that would probably make you laugh.

And you don't know any of it.

You remember the child you last held, while knowing that child has continued growing beyond the last memory you were allowed to make. That is an especially agonizing part of grandparent alienation.

You aren't only missing your grandchildren. You are missing who they are becoming.

Childhood keeps moving.

Birthdays arrive whether you're invited to them or not. School pictures are taken. Teeth fall out. Shoes get bigger. Someone discovers a sport, a song, a book—or an entire part of themselves—you may know nothing about. And every so often, a thought arrives that can knock the wind out of you:

How much have they changed since I last knew them?

Because childhood does not wait for families to repair themselves. Even if reconciliation comes—and I will always leave room for that hope—there are pieces of childhood that cannot be placed back into our hands later.

You can build new memories.

You can love each other again.

You can learn who everyone has become.

But you cannot go back and attend the birthday that already happened.

That is what makes the passing of time so unconscionably excruciating for an alienated grandparent. We aren't simply counting the years apart. We know exactly what those years are taking with them.

What a Photograph Cannot Tell You

A photograph can capture a moment and still fail to show everything that moment contains.

I have photographs from the last day I was allowed to see my grandchildren. We are piled together on Grammie's bed inside my tractor-trailer, laughing and leaning into one another. My son was behind the camera taking the pictures. None of us knew we were documenting a goodbye.

But there is something else in those photographs that no one looking at them could possibly know.

We are sitting on a crocheted blanket made for me by my Avó—my grandmother, their great-great-grandmother. The same blanket that once passed through her hands was now underneath mine and those of her great-great-grandchildren. Above us, hanging from the upper bunk, is another handmade blanket. Their mother made that one for me our first Christmas together, when I already knew my son had met the woman he would marry.

My grandmother's hands made one. My daughter-in-law's hands made the other. My son stood behind the camera. His children were piled around me on Grammie's bed.

There was an entire family history inside that photograph.

And none of us knew we were taking pictures of the last day.

Five generations of one family were inside those photographs, even though only four generations were still alive to see them.

That is what people sometimes fail to understand when they speak casually about the loss of a grandparent-grandchild relationship. We aren't grieving a title. We are grieving living connections between generations—the stories, traditions, ordinary days and pieces of family history that were supposed to keep traveling forward.

And sometimes you don't realize just how much a photograph is holding...

until it is all you have left.

When There Were No Memories to Begin With

There is another kind of grandparent grief that is spoken about even less: loving a grandchild you have never been allowed to meet.

There are no memories to take out when you miss them because you were never given the chance to make any. You know their name. You may have seen photographs. You may watch them grow through whatever fragments happen to reach you. But you have never held them, heard their little voice in the room, or had the chance to become part of their memories.

And there is something particularly cruel about being told, directly or indirectly, that you cannot possibly miss someone you have never met.

Of course you can.

You can love a grandchild before they ever know your face. You can wonder who they are becoming. You can imagine the first hug that has never happened. You can ache over birthdays you were never part of and milestones you learned about from a photograph—or perhaps never learned about at all.

Some grandparents are grieving a relationship they once had. Others are grieving a relationship they were never given the opportunity to have. And some of us are carrying both.

When Telling the Truth About Your Pain Becomes “Playing the Victim”

There is something else alienated grandparents encounter that I find particularly troubling.

Increasingly, when we try to talk about what this experience has done to us, the conversation can turn almost immediately to whether we are taking enough responsibility.

Sometimes simply describing the loss is interpreted as blame. Speak about changes you've noticed in the way family conflict is discussed online and you're blaming social media. Question whether every difficult family relationship should be reduced to labels and you're criticizing therapists. Talk about losing access to grandchildren after an adult relationship fractured and someone may decide you're avoiding accountability. Describe the torment itself and sooner or later that phrase appears: playing the victim.

But pain is not an argument about innocence.

A grandparent can examine their own behavior honestly, acknowledge mistakes, apologize where an apology is warranted and still say, “What has happened to me is excruciating.” Those things are not mutually exclusive.

I don't believe every estranged parent or grandparent is blameless. I don't believe every adult child is cruel. Families are far too complicated for me to make either claim, and Heart's Renewal was never meant to be a courtroom where one generation is declared guilty and the other innocent.

What concerns me is the idea that before an alienated grandparent is permitted to speak about grief, they must first prove that they deserve to grieve. We don't require that of most hurting people.

And when grandchildren are involved, there is another human relationship in the middle of all of this. Whatever happened between adults, a grandparent may still be grieving a child they loved, cared for, knew intimately and expected to watch grow up.

Calling that grief victimhood doesn't make it disappear. It only makes the person carrying it less willing to speak.

I am not interested in deciding which generation gets to hurt. I am interested in making room for the hurt that is already here.

You can continue living and still have your breath taken away by the children's aisle in a store. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still ache for four particular little faces. But when you love a grandchild you cannot see, there is no “at least” that makes the absence small. You can be grateful for every memory and still be devastated that there aren't new ones being made. You can laugh at something your grandchild once said and cry five minutes later because you don't even know what their voice sounds like now.

Those truths can exist together.

You Were Their Grandparent on the Ordinary Days, Too

Grandparenthood isn't made only from holidays and photographs. So much of it lives in the ordinary things—the snacks and stories, baths and car seats, cartoons and trips to the park. It's holding a little hand across a parking lot, finding the toy they were absolutely certain had disappeared forever, or listening to a story that made almost no sense and treating it as though it were the most important thing you'd heard all day.

For many grandparents, some of the most treasured time came when their grandchildren's parents were working and they got to have those hours together. There were practices and games, favorite foods kept in the cupboard, a special cup that belonged only to them, artwork on the refrigerator and that one stuffed animal everyone knew had better be found before bedtime. Your house sounded different when they were there. It felt different.

Those weren't chores on a grandparent's schedule. They were pieces of a childhood you were privileged to share.

And when that time is suddenly taken away, you don't only miss the big occasions. You miss making the snack. You miss buckling the car seat. You miss hearing the same story again. You even miss the mess left behind after they went home. You miss being part of their ordinary life.

You miss knowing exactly which stuffed animal had to be in the bed before anybody was going to sleep. You simply miss the beautiful noise that children bring with them.

Those moments mattered. They still matter.

A severed relationship does not erase the love that came before it.

And Then There Are the Cards

Grandparents Day has a way of announcing itself everywhere. You can be having a perfectly ordinary morning and suddenly there it is—a display of cards in a store, a photograph online of a grandfather with his grandchildren, or a friend sharing the beautiful handmade card that came home from school.

I can be genuinely happy for that grandparent and still feel the ache in my own heart. Those feelings don't cancel each other out. Seeing another family celebrating something I desperately miss doesn't make me bitter or resentful of their happiness. It simply reminds me, sometimes without warning, of what is absent from my own life.

Social media can make days like this especially difficult because celebration after celebration passes in front of you. I don't think we should tell grieving grandparents how they are supposed to handle that. One person may want to look through old photographs and remember every wonderful moment. Another may know that opening that photo album will be too much this year. Someone else may turn off the phone altogether and spend the day somewhere that has nothing to do with Grandparents Day.

None of those choices measures how much a grandparent loves their grandchildren. Sometimes getting through a significant day means knowing what your own heart can handle and giving yourself permission to honor that.

If No Card Comes

This is what I most want to say to you. If no card comes tomorrow, if the phone doesn't ring, or even if years have passed without anyone acknowledging the place you once held in your grandchildren's lives, you are still their grandparent.

Relationships can be interrupted. Access can be taken away. Families fracture, and people sometimes carry completely different stories about how that fracture happened. But nobody can go backward through time and make you never have been Grandma, Grandpa, Nana, Nonna, Papa, Avó, or Grammie.

You were there. You loved them. You remember them. You shared a piece of their childhood with them, and whatever has happened since cannot make that history disappear. And somewhere in another person's childhood are moments that happened because you were in them.

No silence can make those moments unhappen.

Tomorrow, I Will Say Their Names in My Heart

I am Grammie to four grandchildren, and I love them. That sentence does not require access, permission or anyone else's agreement.

I would rather be spending Grandparents Day hearing their voices than writing about missing them. Of course I would. But if that isn't the day I am given, I will not allow silence to convince me that my love disappeared with the relationship. It didn't.

I am still their Grammie.

And if tomorrow hurts for you too, I hope you will remember that you don't have to prove your grief by suffering every minute. You don't have to stop loving them in order to keep living, and the absence of a card tomorrow does not make your grandparenthood any less real.

 So tonight, before the photographs and celebrations begin, I want to honor the grandparents who may otherwise feel invisible tomorrow—the ones with photographs but no new memories, who know their grandchildren's ages but no longer know their shoe sizes, and who still instinctively see something in a store and think, They would love this.

I want to honor those carrying birthdays in their hearts that they are no longer invited to celebrate, and those loving children from a distance they never chose. I see you. Tomorrow belongs to you, too.

It doesn't belong to you because somebody sends a card, posts your photograph or makes your phone ring. It belongs to you because somewhere in this world is a child—or perhaps now an adult—whose story contains you. And love like that doesn't become imaginary simply because there is silence around it.

Happy Grandparents Day.

From one missing Grammie to another grandparent who understands:

You are still a grandparent. You are still allowed to love them.

And you are not alone here.

Heart's Renewal

Heard · Held · Not Alone

Peace · Purpose · Wholeness