Mrs. Faigie Horowitz: The Silent Grief of Grandparents

The Silent Grief of Grandparents

Mrs. Faigie Horowitz never planned on starting a support group for grandmothers who lost a married child.  But then, within just three days, she met three different women living through that exact loss.

One woman could barely speak about it. One was drowning in unbearable pain. And the other quietly said, “I follow my daughter’s lead.”

Three grandmothers. Three reactions. One heartbreak that almost no one talks about. That was the moment Mrs. Horowitz realized: this grief needed a space of its own.

And when she shared the idea of creating a support group for these grandmothers, the response was immediate: “Yes. This is needed.”

In this deeply moving podcast episode, Mrs. Horowitz speaks about the complicated and often invisible grief of grandparents after the loss of a child who left behind a spouse and children.

She also shares a powerful idea rooted in research: children who feel connected to their family story are often more resilient, confident, and emotionally grounded.

It makes sense.
Why do we still tell over Yetzias Mitzrayim generation after generation?  Because stories shape identity.

Similarly, when a parent dies, children are often left longing to know: What was my parent like? What made them laugh? What mattered to them?

Sometimes those conversations feel too painful to ask directly. But through stories, memories, and connection to the larger family narrative, grandchildren can still feel deeply connected to where they come from — and to the parent they lost.

YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsK24OSmIYG_XWzeplhfmb8LJcWKphITh&si=untn3fmHLLaEEFNm

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relief-from-grief-by-mayrim/id1788349916

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3AvWNp0DrHqE5AVYJHooiK?si=ufpIObuGRumS5uFXmvrpgA 

Questions or feedback? Email me at: podcast@mayrim.org

Transcript

Welcome And Mayrim’s Mission

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Greek Journey Podcast, hosted by Mr. Miriam Riviet and brought to you by Mayrim. Mayrim is an organization dedicated to supporting families who have experienced the loss of a child. It was founded with the witness mass Amaliba and Miriam Holman. Despite her illness, Miriam devoted herself to addressing the needs of parents and siblings, navigating the profound pain of child loss. This mission was deeply personal to her and experience loss firsthand. Her older sister Amalib passed away. Mayrimm continues to honor and expand upon the work Miriam began with her parents carrying this mission forward with unwavering dedication. If you have any questions or comments for the speaker, or if you would like to suggest a guest for the podcast, please email us at podcast at Mayrim.org.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Hey everybody, thank you so so much for coming on the Grief Journey podcast today. Um today I'm very excited to be hosting Rebiton Feige Harowitz from Lawrence. She's the co-founder of JWOW and a very big, important community activist. So thank you so so much for coming on.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

You're welcome, Miriam. It was a delight to meet you in person at the recent Vital Voices Conference of CORE, because of course I had known you from your ads, from your books, and your important work that you do with people who have sustained the loss or who are grieving a loss. And it's important for the community at large to know about life as well as death.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

It is. Thank you for that. So I was really excited for you to come on today because we're talking about grief from a little bit of a different angle that I never really had any guests on that spoke about it, spoke about it from this angle.

The Triple Layer Of Grandparent Grief

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Um, we want to talk about grandparent loss. No, not really grandparent loss, a a grandparent that losed like that loses a child or an in-law child and they have to deal with their grandchildren who lost a parent, right? Did I say that correct? You did.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

And that's exactly the point. It's not just when a grandparent is involved, it's another layer. It's another layer of loss. They have lost a child or an in-law child, and they have they have a surviving child or in-law child that they want to support, and they have grandchildren who lost a parent, but they themselves have sustained a loss. So it's three levels of loss and support that may be needed. Can the grandparent do it all? Absolutely not. But a grandparent can understand, a grandparent is an adult, a grandparent um has to sometimes acknowledge their own emotions and help the other two generations because we grandparents take responsibility, we can't deny our own losses, but there are other people who are depending on us. So that sense of responsibility sometimes comes forward and and may push down the person's own loss.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

So how does someone walk that tightrope? Feeling their pain and really grieving that they what they have to grieve, but at the same time not coming down on the grieving spouse or children. So I am not a therapist.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

I am the daughter of a therapist and the mother of a therapist. Um and I do talk to grandmothers, and this has not been my personal experience, but Ruh Hashem, I have not lost a child or an in-law child, and this situation that I just described is not my own personal situation. So, how do I know anything about this? And then I'll respond to the question. Earlier this winter, uh, after Yundif, I was in Manhattan for a Leviah, and I met someone whom I had not seen for many, many years, and it was a little early, so we chatted, and we knew each other from way back, and our families were closely connected. And I said, So how are you doing? And she made a comment, and I followed up. Something was going on in her community. She said, She paused, and she said, I guess you don't know that I lost my grandmy son-in-law, and she seemed to be having a very hard time with it. And she explained to me a little more about the situation, how recent it was, and how her daughter does not live near her, and her daughter has several children whom she is raising on her own, and the pluses and minuses of moving near her daughter to help her, and so on. That was one day. Two days later, I was in another community, much, much larger, and I ran into two women who I know a long time. Both of them were in the situation of being mothers-in-law of people who were NIFTE, and there being several children in the home without a parent, in their own home without a parent. One had lost, one group had lost a mother, one group had lost a father. So I felt comfortable enough, and that it wasn't disrespectful since I had acknowledged the loss with notes. Um, I asked one how she's doing and how's it going with supporting the grandchildren and these layers, whatever. I I made it general enough that it wasn't just about her, it was about the situation, because one has to be careful. So she said to me, I do whatever my daughter lets me do, meaning I'm following her lead, I follow her cues. She's telling me how I can be supportive, and I do what she lets me, and I don't overstep my boundaries. The other grandmother did not want to talk about it. It was very obvious. She chatted how I'm doing, how is a member of my family who had been ill, did not want to address it, so I kept my mouth shut. So what did that teach me? It I was very profoundly affected. Before we even left the community, while my husband was Davenning Mincha, I started making phone calls. Is there an because I saw in three days three different kinds of reactions? One was I'm a mess, one was I follow my child's lead. The third was seeming to, on the outside, seemed to be oblivious. Um and I spoke to one of my more than one of my friends who are therapists, and I spoke to my partner at Jewish Women of Wisdom, which is of course an online group and platform for Women 50 Plus, which was co-founded by Miriam Lieberman and I and Sara Brait, and is currently run by Miriam Lieberman and I. And Miriam said, Oh, that must be so hard. Miriam is actually uh an MSW by training, even though she doesn't practice, but she is involved, and she has written a book about the first book for Jewish teenagers about grief. In any case, we began to learn and question what is this about?

Three Grandmothers Three Different Reactions

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Is there anyone offering support to grandparents in this position? And everybody said, it's needed, it is so difficult, there are so many layers. Yes, people could use support, but there was nothing available in the from world, no support group, no specialized therapy or specialty therapists. So we began to ask those people like, what do you think? Would there be room for doing something for our fellow grandmothers who are in this very painful situation where they are grandparenting grandchildren who have had a loss, they are parenting, they are parents of adult children or in-law children who have lost a partner and they have their own grief. Excuse me. So the answer was a resounding yes. We spoke to some of the grief organizations at so on, and we began to ask around who would be able to do this, and this was something that Miriam Lieberman and I felt very strongly about. And since it wasn't addressed, we decided we would take what is turning out to be a six-session Zoom series for grandmothers in this situation. And we took our time. We were pressured into doing this right away. Yes, the need is great. Do it before Pesa. You know, the Siddharam without a father or without a mother, Yantiv is very hard for children and so on. But we basically took our time. We realized that we needed to do it right and we needed to do it sensitively. We needed to have the right person run it, and we needed to outreach with sensitivity as well. We found Susan Lamb, who is a veteran therapist connected with Torah Massora's counterforce program based in Brooklyn. She has run countless grandparent support groups, countless uh parenting classes, and supervises many therapists on parenting issues. Although she has spoken to grandparents of children of divorce, grandparents of other kinds of family situations. Um, this is a very unique niche. And she found that that there really isn't much literature, and there really isn't a lot, but her years of parenting and dealing with grandparents in difficult situations vis-a-vis their grandchildren definitely gives her the most credentials of anyone I know who is a professional serving our community. I will say this, and then I'm gonna stop. In our community, the contact between grandparents and grandchildren is much more frequent and much more profound because of the Jewish lifestyle that we live. There are Yamim Tovim, there are rituals, there are brachels that one gives there of Yom Kippur, there's the Pesach Seder, Vigatella Vincha, there's Avasubhanim, there's there's um there's you know many situations where a parent is expected, the mother-daughter lunch in. Um and we tend to be very close to our progeny, and we realize that our Mesorah is not just a matter of birthing children and having nachas from grandchildren, but that is a that is the the on which we tr we share our values and the tyra. So, you know, it's it's it's something that is serious, it is something that is real, and it's something we wanted to do for our fellow grandmothers who are in this situation. So we offered this, and this program is beginning right after right after Schwusz, a day or two later, um, has tried to reach out to people in different locales, in different venues, and at the same time, to through Rebitons, I am a Rebitson, I belong to several Rebitzin groups, and we've been in many places, but we're still trying to be sensitive. There's a shear I go to every Thursday morning here in Lawrence, and um I did not distribute flyers and I did not announce it because there's someone who comes week in, week out, and she has several set several grandchildren who are missing a parent. So how many people are you starting with?

Building A Private Support Series

SPEAKER_02 13:51

We have we have between 15 and 20 um signed up. It's not gonna be very big. 8758-0400. Whoever answers the phone will will take your name and your information and fill out a form for you, and we'll get back to you and tell you when to expect it to begin. It will be completely private. No one from JWA will be on. Susan, it's Susan Lamb and the participants, and it is re it will not be recorded, so there's safety there. Um, and and whatever will be said will remain private, and it is expected that people will keep their cameras on during the session. So I I just want to be sure to talk about that. This, which is a unique opportunity. We're not going to do it again. Um, this is our gift to women who are unfortunately in this situation. This is not what we do, but we are making an exception for a unique population which is not recognized and whose grief is not always uh acknowledged, even though the grandmothers sit Shiva and are there as much as they possibly can.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

So, what's the difference between I mean, what's the difference? I know there's a difference, but a grandparent is still a grandparent. If they lose a child, an adult child with children, they still have the same uh issues with uh their grandchildren having only one parent. I guess it gets a little more sticky because it's their in-law child that's a surviving parent.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

I'm not a Maven, but and I will qualify what uh my reaction is very carefully. I don't think it's necessarily bad. I don't think it's necessarily sticky. Yes, there's a pre-existing relationship that could exist with an in-law child, and it may be complex. It may be complex with one's own child if they're the surviving parent. However, intelligent people who have sustained a loss in the family understand that it is important to work together as a team to be the safety net for the grandchildren. And they can't change the reality, but they can make the kids feel secure, they can, you know, deal uh send them for therapy, they can be there, be a physical presence. Um there's a lot they can do, and hearing strategies from others as well as ideas and and from the the veteran therapist leading this series, Susan Lamb, um, can be very helpful in navigating both the adult relationship, the relationship with the the grandchildren, as well as one's own grief. And how does one express that? You can't sit and cry in front of the kids, but you can't deny that you also feel pain and sorrow. So all this will be explored over six sessions. Six sessions it'll be several sessions, as and each one will have a topic, discussion, and keep in mind that there will be some ideas shared for stressful times and difficult situations and scenarios discussed to give a person language that they can use. You know, some one of the grandmothers made me aware um um that every time there's a family event, it's an issue. They come for Shabbos, who's preparing the lech? There's no father there. That's traditional in in Kharedi households, especially from Eastern Europe. The father prepares the Shabbos candles. There's no father there. Is her husband doing it? Is she doing it for herself? Should her mother have the table set with the candlesticks beforehand for everybody? Um, there's she explained to me that there's so many family times. They're having um uh a celebration in honor of someone's big birthday. It's gonna be a male-only event. There's no mail from this, no adult male from this family's from this family. What is gonna be? Who should be invited? How's it gonna work? Should they change the plans? It's an ongoing thing. Unfortunately.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

As a non-therapist, because you keep on letting us know that you're not a therapist, um like how how how does a grandparent like pick up the cues and follow them? And what happens when they're they see the child really not coping and like they, you know, the the spouse not coping and they wanna step in more and help out more, but the child doesn't want, then it causes resentment and like they're watching the family fall apart.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

I'm not gonna answer the question because I'm not a therapist. However, I will say even if you don't join this group, whether you are the grandmother, grandfather, surviving spouse, or child, discuss it with your therapist. Olive, don't think you can figure everything out. And in general, in life, if you express your emotions carefully at the right time and at the right place and are aware of relationships with good intention, even if you make some boo-boos, over time things can get better. Everybody wants this to work positively. Everyone's hurting, everyone's and but everyone wants it to be good. So the hows, the how-to's and the hows and the language, that's between you and your therapist. Okay, so this is something or or in this group where there will be several you's and a th a veteran therapist who is used to guiding and has many years of experience of guiding grandparents who are not directly in the parha.

Boundaries With The Surviving Parent

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Okay, so let's talk about. I know this is you're passionate about it. Um, this could be whether a a parent is NIFTA or not, but especially if a parent is NIFTA and the child, if the children were too young and they remember the parent, you have a lot of ways of helping them know their parents.

unknown 21:08

Right?

SPEAKER_02 21:09

I I want to qualify that for a minute. As a grandparent and at J Well, we have discussed and I have done many, many projects to connect my grandchildren to their forebears. My my mother was NIFTER before my kids were married. She did not see a grand a great grandchild. And at this point in my life, I am the matriarch. There is no patriarch either. So it's up to me. And um giving children a, whether they are children or grandchildren, a sense of the family to which they belong is really, really an important factor in their resilience.

Family Stories That Build Resilience

SPEAKER_02 21:57

And now I'm going to tell you about the research of Marshall Duke. At Emory University. He was a Jewish fellow, still alive, who is a research psychologist. And his wife is a special ed teacher, kids with learning disabilities. And she noticed that the kids who knew something about their family background were somehow doing better. They just overall, socially, they the kids who had a sense of family and where they came from and knowledge did better. So they decided, so Duke decided to look at that a little more closely. Long story short, he got a lot of government research money and private money. And he and his assistant, Dr. Robin Fivish, also Jewish, tested knowledge of the family narrative. And they came up with three kinds of family narratives. Telling the family story can go three ways. It can go as an ascending narrative. We came with just the shirts on our backs after a war, and now we own five department stores and we own a lot of Manhattan real estate. Going upwards, then there's the descending family narrative. We were like the the robber barons. We we made our money in railroads at the end of the 1800s. In the 1920s, we lost some. The family really kind of got it into all the pitfalls of wealthy children with legacy money. And um now, you know, my the cousins are are basically own gas stations in uh the swamps of South Florida, meaning a descending narrative. We didn't do well with what we got. We we had and we went downhill. Then there is what is called the oscillating narrative, the up and down narrative, like an oscillating fan. That tells of a family's ups and downs of struggles and comebacks, of good times and bad times. That is the narrative you want to tell your progeny, whether they are children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. Knowing that a family has come back from hard times, has gone through stress, loss, impoverishment, fire, um, shrinking of their business or their profession or whatever it is. Yet moving on is the most healthy thing for a child. And they tested this. This they tested this with the research money that they had, and they found this to be so. As a matter of fact, Robin Fivish devised the do-you-know scale, um, a list of questions, 20 questions. If the kid knows the answers to the questions or similar information, like how did your parents meet, uh, what happened during the year your mother was born? Um tell me do you the family jokes, the family stories when someone, let's say, froze in the middle of something. If you know the ups and downs, you have a lot of information about your family, you are stronger.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Um is it just the ups and downs, or is it also like the characteristics that people had?

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Right, because when you're telling a story, you're not just telling uh uh, you're not just following uh a needle uh on a graph. You're telling them about the people and about their likes and dislikes, but the do the do you know scale of 20 questions gives you a range of both information personalities, funny things, location, etc. So some of their work began in the late, you know, in the 90s, and then after 9-11, they went into New York City, this research team from Emory in Atlanta, and they saw that the kid and their their it was born out without question, school-age kids who know their family stories, they did better socially, they had less learning issues, they were more confident, they were more resilient, okay? Um, because they had a model and they identified with that model, right? Logic tells us this, right? Now, in our from community, this is the norm. We tell the family stories. It's not just the story of Yetsius Miss Trime that we tell at the Seder night, but we tell of our family's liberation, our family after travails, our family's struggles, etc. Whether they were not survivors of Hitler's Horbon or not, every family has stories. And that is really very pivotal to the resilience of the individual kids and their ability to go through hardship. I want to segue for two seconds. Um one of the Kadeshim in Shul, right after October 7th, some of the grandmothers were saying we were bringing our kids back, we brought our grandchildren back from Eritus Rao. It's too stressful. And I said to them, because I know them well, and I said it respectfully, um, didn't you teach your grandchildren your parents while they survived the chorban, how they ran away, how they they lived through the camps, they remarried and rebuilt. Didn't you teach your grandchildren to venerate their grandparents and to know, and don't they know exactly where they come from and what those stories were? And they said, Yeah. So I said, you know what? There's a little bit of survivor in your grandchildren, or a lot of survivor. They've heard these stories of Gavura, they've heard these stories of Bitachon, they've seen people who've lived their Amuna. Don't you think they could handle this? So gave them a little bit of a paradigm shift because this is exactly it. And I knew that this hevra really taught their grandparents kibbut of aim. They all know, they all know. So, back to La Misa. So I any grandparent, especially my generation of the baby boomers, we grew up, we uh unlike most peep people in the room community, my age group, I am not a grandchild of survivors. I am not a child of survivors. Our family is here since the 1920s. Nonetheless, there is much that the grandchildren can learn and gain from hearing about the struggles, the ups and the downs, the changes and the challenges of our family in those 100 years. So, what do I do about it?

Practical Ways To Preserve A Legacy

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Pictures tell a thousand words. Um, uh pictures are worth a thousand words. So I share photos with my grandchildren. We don't just look at albums. I kind of stage something at a family get-together at a Hanukkah party. Uh, I once made a bas mitzvah um in my house, and when everyone came, it was just family. All the all my children, their spouses, the grandchildren. Thank God everybody lives here in the tri-state area. And um they were able to attend. On each Bilka, there was a little um place card holder, and in the place card was an old CPF photo. Um, and some of them had documents, some were not so old, something like this. Oh wow. Okay, and so that created conversation. The girl who was Bas Mitzvah was named a certain name. So we later on we talked about her, and she had such a long lifespan. Um, it was kind of hard to relate, but I I I get send my grandchildren pictures of fam old family members. Um, I take them to meet great aunts and uncles who tell them about their childhood. Our family comes from Chicago from one side. We're there, like I said, since the 1920s, we had ups and downs. We had a big, magnificent shoal that seated 900 people in the in the 20s, and there was a period in the 60s where there was a tiny, tiny little stigla. Now our family is well represented by Rabunem in three shoals in Chicago, and and the our family has an up and down history in Chicago. It was up, it was down, there were deaths, there were mistakes, there was a fire, there were more early deaths, and but now the family um runs a big chasset empire that serves people from young to old, has a medical center and lots of services for seniors and so on, and sends food to the hospitals and so on. What is the point here? The point is that my grandchildren have heard and have seen about some of this. Now it's hard to tell kids, but I try to be creative and think about how I can engage them. Um, how can I engage them in in their history? I bought them photo albums, I send, like I said, I sent pictures to camp. Here's an envelope that went to my granddaughter in Camp Gila, and it never got to her. But two years later, someone found it. Here's a picture of my grandmother, and I I I labeled it. My grandmother was 16 when she came to Chicago to marry Reba from Eichenstein in 1931. They were engaged in Pittsburgh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That um in Europe they made shedukhem often meeting halfway between the hometowns of the Mechetonim, and they continued that. The Kala was from the Bronx, and the Chassin was from Chicago, and they met and became engaged in Pittsburgh. I also showed her an article I had written for Bina magazine in that same envelope about called In My Grandmother's Kitchen that talked about this grandmother who you see here as the big girl. Um, I also've done some other interesting things that I have fun with. I realized that this grandmother and other people lived school folks in different places. My grandmother died at 96. That's many, many decades. She was born in 1914, and they were running from the war, from World War I. And I went through some documents that someone sent me and some pictures. And one of my last year on her yard side, he had off. It was Memorial Day, so he came over. And um, I I realized he had no clue which war was in 1914, even though he was almost bar mitzvah. So later that afternoon, I put together a list of my grandmother's dates, and I checked it over time. And what we did just recently is I took the coupos, wrote down the highlights, and someone is helping me put together the pictures I have assembled over years, and which my many of which my grandchildren already have, but putting it in um a slideshow because the the yard side is coming up. Someone is helping me with that. Now I'm gonna show you something else I did with a timeline for my mother, not my grandmother. I did the same thing be but similar for a Hanukkah party. I I wrote a brief timeline with the like five or six tkufos, and I picked out three or four major events during each tkufa, like um like birth of uh four children, birth of the fifth child was in a may have been in a different location, etc. Um, the start of my parents yeshiva. Um, I'm the daughter of the late late Novominska Rebbe and Rebitsin, Alehem Hasholam. So none of my grandchildren knew my mother, none of they knew my father. So we one of the kids copied it over on the big post-its, and here you have one tK, marriage and crown heights years 1956 to 1963. The highlight was birth of four children. Then I had a stack of photos, and we went around the room figuring out who was in the photo and what SKUFA they belonged to. So it was real, really nice. One of the granddaughters said, let's save it, Bobby, let's do it again. Um, and we did. It's these are hanging in one of my guest bedrooms, and we did it again when family came, a great aunt came, my mother's sister, and we we enjoyed it. It was pleasant. It she shared memories, they saw someone who was connected to my mother, and they had a sense of place, and it's beginning to come together. It's a couple of years already. I do have a lot of so, yes, we we have many ways in which to connect the grandkids, and they know it's an interest of mine, and some of them are more interested than others, but it definitely gives them a sense of of identity, who they are, uh where they come from, and that it hasn't always been so perfect. You know, they all commented on the um the difference between one set of brothers in the picture, in the passport picture, and what they looked like a few years later in America, you know. Um and it gives them a sense of place. When one of them went to camp, she figured out that somebody with a certain last name was her relative. And how are we related? And she knew she knew enough when I sent her a picture or explained she knew who I was talking about. So they were probably fourth or fifth cousins when I come over from Meritus Raw, but they figured my granddaughter had the background so that she could confirm and remember that which I had told her once I told it to her. You know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Right.

SPEAKER_02 38:31

We're basically laying the groundwork as they get older, they meet more people, whether they come from Eric C. Roll or not. Um, and there's a sense of where you come from.

SPEAKER_01 38:43

Right, right. It's so interesting. My daughter, she's a ninth grade, so she got a whole new, you know, new class, and there was someone by the last name of whatever. And I was like, Oh my, she's our cousin, she's her third cousin, Esther Matthew, she's your third cousin. And she's like, So I'm like, no, you don't understand. She has the best grandparents every third time. She came and like, like, I know what she's named after. She's named after, you know, her great-grandmother who's my guy. She's like, um, okay. But um well, let me tell you what I did.

Creating Cousin Connections And Community

SPEAKER_02 39:12

Uh, because my grandchildren have a lot of cousins who they don't know from one side. My one son-in-law is from abroad, so he has zero, almost zero family here. I made two cousins shabbatoni. One was so big that the next one I made just for 12th and up. But we had the cousins connection shabbatones, and girls from one side of the family, ninth and up, ninth grade and up, came for Shabbos. Some of them lived in the same neighborhood. Their parents were first cousins, they did not know each other.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 39:52

And my husband told them about the family Friday night, Shabbos Day also. Some I had asked them, you know, to prepare some games or something, you know, to break the ice. They didn't, most of them did not know each other. So they did. Some of them, some of them asked their grandparents to help with with trivia from the family. Uh nice. And and we took out not too many, but we took out a few pictures during my husband's talk, and it was treasured. They they were so appreciative, and they, of course, the second time the older girls were invited, two years later, they showed up, and it was so geschmack for everybody. I didn't have to prepare and figure out the rooms, and uh, but um, and I gave them each for an activity, Matsushavis. They interviewed each other, and each one made a scrapbook page for the other one. So I could have a souvenir and they get would get to know each other better one-on-one with all kinds of you know, sticky uh art supplies that I have in the house. So we kind of look at this from a contemporary angle as well as from a historical angle because I learned that this was not going to happen naturally. Today, people don't invite cousins or people they don't know very well for Chavez. It is socially off. Plus, the parents are overwhelmed with what they need to do and the responsibilities they have, the jobs, the kids, the community. So they're not looking to send their kids away for Chavez. Forget who they're going to. They would trust their relatives. But um, it was up to me to make sure that they would have this. And someone asked me, like, is it that important that my kid comes? Um, she's a few years younger, she's on the younger side of the age group. I said, Honey bunch, your kid may land up in another city with very little family, and that cousin might be the only family that she has. Let her feel a sense of connection. Family is there through good times and through tough times. Everyone needs a thick family support network. When they are younger, less, when they are older, more, and when they're even older, more. Right. Because they enjoy the memories.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

Wow. Wow. Okay, amazing. I think we could just end off with like that. I know we spoke about living, but I think that sometimes also when a child is doesn't know their parents, and sometimes the grandparent wants to tell them, did you know that your father was like this? Did you know that your mother loved it? And they get like annoyed, like, don't tell me I I'm not thinking about it, and like I don't want you to remind like I don't want to talk about it. But if you do it in such a way where it's like the whole, you know, um large family going all the way back generations, then they learn about their parents also without feeling that pressure of like that they have to know that parent to make their grandparents happy. Right?

SPEAKER_02 43:16

Well, very well said. The greater context, context is always so pivotal to messages that we give uh to children. And if we think about it before, if it's intentional grandparenting, and intentional Jewish grandparenting, it is so important to their personal development, to their recovery, to their identification as Yiddin and as a member of Claudius Row.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Thank you so so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

How To Join And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_02 43:50

Before we go, I just want to repeat the number to call to sign up for the grandmother's compassion. Six-part series of support for grandmothers who have grandchildren who are bereaved of a parent, not of a sister and brother, but of a parent in the last few years. We are doing this together with Mask, Mothers Align and Fathers Aligned Saving Kids, 718-758-0400. Mask's involvement is administrative only. And you can find us at Jewish WomenofWisdom.org, led by Miriam Lieberman of Lawrence and myself, Feggy Horowitz of Lawrence.

SPEAKER_01 44:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

You've just listened to an episode of the Grief Journey Podcast with Miriam Ribiat, brought to you by Mayrim. For more episodes, please visit the Mayrim website at www.mayrim.org. Help us reach others who may benefit from this podcast. If you know someone who might find it meaningful, please consider sharing it with them. If you have questions or comments for the speaker, or if you would like to suggest a guest for a future episode, we would love to hear from you. Email us at podcast at mayrim.org. We look forward to having you join us for the next episode.