The Devastating
Loss of
Grandparents
among One Million
COVID Dead
Grandparents are a majority
of the pandemic’s death tollT
hink of the dead grandparents and everything
they’ll miss. All the milestones, the middle
school graduations and bar mitzvahs and
quinceañeras. All the victories, on soccer fields
or piano recital halls. All the ordinary shared
moments, dancing to Baby Beluga, or making
banana bread, building extravagant Lego towers,
watching The Wizard of Oz and cuddling at the
flying monkeys part.
And the grandchildren, now bereft and sorrow-
ful—think of everything they’ll miss, too. The wide
embrace, the rapt attentiveness, the patient re-
reading of the same Dory Fantasmagory book over
and over again. What those grandchildren have
lost, two years into a ravaging pandemic that dis-proportionately kills the elderly, is a precious piece
of their birthright: the feeling that they are totally
and unconditionally adored, “gleaming with satis-
faction at being this very child,” as poet Galway
Kinnell once put it. In Kinnell’s poem, it was the
parents who made the child feel so cherished, but
to my mind, that glow is what grandparents pro-
vide best. Not even the most devoted parent hasthe time to marshal the unmitigated, unfiltered,
focused adoration of a doting grandparent.
Scientists have known about the special balm
of grandparents for a long time. In the 1980s the
husband-and-wife team of Arthur and Carol Korn-
haber looked at 300 grandparent-grandchild pairs
in a longitudinal study. Arthur Kornhaber, a child
psychiatrist, became interested in the subject after FG Trade/Getty ImagesRobin Marantz Henig, a long-time science journalist, is author of nine books
and has written for the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and many
others. She writes frequently about grandparenthood for the Atlantic’s Web site.OPINION