Thru the eyes of a Great Grandmothers wisdom

The burden we carry, the parents of children with special needs thru the eyes of wisdom.

After my son was born, maybe a few months, my grandma made the comment of "How sorry she was that I was going to have to shoulder this burden and go thru this life, and she knew she didn't have the strength it was going to take for me to get thru it." I could tell she was really saddened by it. At the time, I was in a great deal of denial about what the future was going to bring, and that my son would beat the odds and not have any long term problems. My grandmother survived 2 husbands, 3 CRAZY sisters, crazier, meaner mother in law, the death of 3 of her 4 sons before they were 30, and the death of her oldest grandson (my brother) at age 18. She had one heck of a traumatic life surrounded by premature death. Rose Kennedy had nothing on my grandmother. So, when she said what she did I was incredulous. "But Grandma, you are here having buried so many loved ones, those are incredible tragedies that cause inconceiveable grief and yet you are so grounded, loving and forgiving yet tell me you don't have the strength to go thru what I will have to? How can you say that???" She said, and I will remember this always because now I GET IT...."With each death, there is a definite mourning period and process. It is excruciating at first, then as the days, months years pass, you heal. You can get thru birthdays, holidays, major accomplishments like graduations, anniversaires etc. at some point without being consummed by the memory of the lost loved one. You remember the loved ones, but you get to a point where your day isn't consumed by the grief and thoughts of days of past." Then she went on to say (not in a mean ordemeaning or patronizing way but one of love and concern) "you are going to be dealing with this everyday for the rest of your life." In effect, my mourning process will never end. I will have days, or weeks of happiness over accomplishments of my son, but will intermittently be hit with periods of mourning the perfect child. The If only .....moments." I am tearing up now as I wish my son could join a little league baseball team with his typically developing brother, learn to ride a bike (that may still happen, who knows) etc. I shared that because I wanted to reiterate the process of mourning. People have to do it, we all do it in different ways, at different paces with different outcomes. Dads that work outside of the home get a reprieve from the daily grind which can in turn delay the process of going thru all the grieving stages. This causes major rifts in marital life which is the reason the divorce rate for marriages that have special needs children is astronomical. Last I heard, it hovered around 90%. Grandparents usually don't get to see the day to daystruggles of our kids, quite often we live on seperate sides of towns, the state or the continent. They have mourning to do over their grandchild. There are 5 stages of grief, Denial is one of the first stages. It comes in all kinds of UGLY shapes and sizes in the forms of pervasive personality traits. Denial is usually one of the first stages we go thru after shock or in conjunction with. I know this first hand. There were many times in the early years, I would rejoice when a grandparent would finally see what it was we were talking about. I viewed them as small"victories" I suppose. Not in a keeping the score type of way, not in Point for ME, but in Point for them because they were finally progressing in the process of mourning and grief. That is the moral of my rant.