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Resources for Grieving Grandparents

By Al Martinez and Terry Fischer
April 2007

Many facilities, websites, and books exist to help grandparents and their children handle a death in the family Here are a few resources:

Websites:

MADD Online
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) offers resources for all grieving relatives and victims, including a downloadable PDF specifically for grieving grandparents. The site offers tools and resources for anyone wishing to get involved in raising awareness about drunk driving.

AARP Grief and Loss
The AARP website offers access to a variety of services, including local and national community resources for bereavement support; ways to help grandchildren deal with grief; advice on arranging funerals and memorial services; information about claiming survivor benefits; and much more.

Healing Hearts for Bereaved Parents
Healing Hearts provides grief support and services—understanding, suggestions for coping, friendship, but primarily hope—to parents and grandparents who have suffered the loss of a child.

The Compassionate Friends
TCF is a national nonprofit self-help organization with no religious affiliation that offers friendship, understanding, and hope to families grieving the death of a child of any age, from any cause. TCF has nearly 600 chapters, with multiple locations in every state plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

AGAST—Alliance of Grandparents, a Support in Tragedy
An all-volunteer organization, AGAST publishes a quarterly newsletter and operates online forums to help grandparents through the trauma, stress, and grief following the loss of a grandchild.

First Candle/SIDS Alliance
This national nonprofit health organization conducts research and offers support to families who have lost a baby due to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), stillbirth, or other causes. Along with Spanish-language resources, it has bilingual grief crisis counselors available 24 hours a day (800-221-7437).

Grandparent Grief
This pamphlet published by the Western Pennsylvania Affiliate of the SIDS Alliance explores the four overlapping stages of grief experienced by grandparents who lose grandchildren to SIDS: shock and disbelief, searching and yearning, confusion and disorganization, and resolution.

American Hospice Foundation Grief Zone
The AFH Grief Zone provides links to a range of resources—articles, books, brochures, support organizations, training materials, videos—on matters of death and loss.

Loma Linda University Medical Center Bereavement Programs
The website for the Los Angeles-area medical center, which has comprehensive onsite bereavement programs, offers access to a variety of resources, including an article on grandparent grief.

Books:

Grieving Grandparents
by Sherokee Ilse & Lori Leininger
A sensitively written book that includes quotes from many grandparents, Grieving Grandparents examines the complicated loss grandparents feel as they comfort and support their children at the same time they themselves grieve for their grandchild.

Grandparents Cry Twice: Help for Bereaved Grandparents
by Mary Lou Reed, ISBN: 089503204X
When a child dies, grandparents cry both for their lost grandchild and the grief they see their own child has to bear. This book helps them cope.

Grandma’s Tears: Comfort for Grieving Grandparents
by June Cerza Kolf, ISBN: 0801052645
This book addresses often-overlooked grandparent grief with brief chapters that mingle practical survival strategies with first-person accounts from grandparents.

When a Grandchild Dies: What to Do, What to Say, How to Cope
by Nadine Galinsky, ISBN: 0967441609
Drawing on experiences shared by grieving grandparents as well as her own experience as a bereaved mother, Galinsky discusses what grandparents may feel at the beginning, offers advice about communicating with bereaved children and others, and describes a variety of coping mechanisms. Available by mail order from Gal In Sky Publishing Company, P.O. Box 70976, Houston, TX 77270; 713-880-8089.

Forgotten Tears: A Grandmother’s Journey Through Grief
by Nina Bennett
Written by a bereaved grandmother and health care professional, this book describes the sense of isolation felt by grandparents and offers an intimate perspective on the process of redefining “normal” in a life forever changed by the death of a grandchild.

For Bereaved Grandparents
by Margaret H. Gerner, ISBN: 1561230022
Addressing the grief that grandparents feel, For Bereaved Grandparents shows how grandparents can help their children while grieving themselves.

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