By Brigitte L. Nacos
When couples divorce or a widowed spouse remarries, it is not unusual for mothers
or fathers to cut off all ties to their in-laws and deny grandparents contact
with their grandchildren. The plight of grandmothers and grandfathers in such
cases is heart-wrenching and certainly material for an emotion-laden human
interest story. But when you link such family problems to the experiences of 9/11,
you have the stuff for a New
York Times front page article. Under the headline “Parents of 9/11 Victims
Torn From Grandchildren,” Paul Vitello writes in today’s Times,” Five years
after their father was killed at the World Trade Center, two little girls, ages
7 and 5, sat crying in a car parked at the curb of their grandparents’ home
here one December day, refusing to go inside for a court-ordered visit. It was
a painful family tableau rooted in a hundred tangled details, but one
overriding and uncontested reality: 9/11.” One wonders whether 9/11 was and is indeed
the “overriding” factor here or whether the experiences and emotions of the
terrorist attacks are exploited to make for a more compelling saga—especially,
since the story also reveals that “By most accounts, these situations are the
exceptions.”
It is also telling that the reporter quotes an unnamed mediator involved in the financial settlements of 9/11 families who estimates that “1 in 10 of his cases involved estranged grandparents,” but that Kenneth R. Feinberg, head of the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, said “that most families had remained on more or less good terms with in-laws, even after remarriages.”
No doubt, the few cases detailed in the story are the very sad tales of grandparents who lost sons and daughters on 9/11 and thereafter their relationships with their grandchildren. But what about grandparents in similar predicaments whose sons of daughters died of natural causes, in accidents, or in the war in Iraq? Are we to believe that their suffering and emotional pain of these grandparents are less intense since they did not lose their loved ones on 9/11?
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