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Grandma Helps to Fill the Void Left by Sept. 11
Geneva Dunbar's days are a blur of snowsuits, snacks and subtraction problems. From early morning, when she readies three children for school, to nightfall, when she tucks them into bed, she is like any bone- weary, two-hands-aren't-enough mother. The difference is that Mrs. Dunbar, 51, has already raised her own family, and seen them off to college and the business world. But when her daughter died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Mrs. Dunbar found herself part of a vast army of grandparents suddenly thrust into a second round of child- rearing. So, as widows and widowers, many with toddlers and infants, simultaneously grieve, make their way through thickets of bureaucracy and try to reinvent their lives, grandparents like Mrs. Dunbar have put their own plans on hold to keep these sundered families together in the face of enormous and shifting needs. "It's not what I planned," said Mrs. Dunbar, of Brooklyn, whose 31- year-old daughter, Lorisa Taylor, was an insurance broker at Marsh & McLennan. "It is hard for me. But I'm so happy to be able to help in any way I can." For some mothers and mothers-in- law (and a few fathers and fathers- in-law), pitching in has meant quitting jobs or taking leaves of absence, as Mrs. Dunbar did from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to help her son-in-law. An extreme case is Florence Kneff. She quit her job, gave up her apartment and moved in with her daughter, Karen Diaz, after her daughter's husband, Matthew, died on Sept. 11. On Wednesday, Karen died of breast cancer at age 35, leaving her 59-year-old mother to raise her two grandsons, ages 7 and 4. For others, it has meant delaying retirement plans. For all, it has meant concealing their own grief, shortchanging their spouses and other children and tiptoeing through the awkward moments that come with lost privacy and intergenerational living. Some of these women all but moved into their widowed children's homes more than four months ago, leaving behind frozen dinners for their husbands and living like gypsies, with one shoe at one house and its mate at another. Others have cleared a corner of their own homes, now strewn with toys and mounds of laundry. A few with the resources to do so have hired live-in help to assist with household chores and child-rearing, as well as to provide adult company in a suddenly lonely house. But most common is a hybrid solution, like the one that has evolved between Mrs. Dunbar and her son-in-law, Frank Taylor. For weeks after the terror attack, the entire family — including Lorisa's two siblings, her in-laws and her three children — slept in Mrs. Dunbar's single-family home in East Flatbush, spread on air mattresses. But huddling under one roof, common at first among the stunned families, has given way to other improvisations, designed to create what many survivors of 9/11 call "the new normal." Mr. Taylor, an assistant office manager at a law firm in Manhattan, who lives eight blocks from his mother-in- law, said that if his children had their way "we'd all be in one house." Instead, Tatiana, 11, Imani, 4, and Cyann, 3, spend their days with Mrs. Dunbar and divide their nights between the two households. When the children sleep at home, Mrs. Dunbar goes there in the morning to get them fed and dressed, so that Mr. Taylor is not late for work. Then, before she knows it, it is 2:30 p.m. and time for the scramble of picking up the children at their three schools, looking for misplaced backpacks, cleaning up spilled juice and potato-chip crumbs and cooking dinner while helping Imani with "three- take-away-one." Mr. Taylor said that leaving them with Mrs. Dunbar allowed his grieving mother-in-law "to hold onto a little of what she lost," while giving him "time to myself and to hang with my friends." She agreed. She craved the children's presence, she said, because they were "a piece of Lorisa," and the tasks of caring for them kept her from sinking into despair. But Mrs. Dunbar assumes Mr. Taylor is also guided by his own state of mind. "I don't ever see him grieving but I see his eyes and sometimes they're shot," she said. "He doesn't want the kids to see him falling apart." Nor does she want them to see her unravel. So she gulps back tears when Tatiana resists going home because the apartment holds too many memories of her mother. Or when Cyann finds the wedding album and squeals, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy." Or when Imani, playing with a toy telephone, says she is calling heaven and passes the receiver to her reluctant grandmother. "Hey, Ris," Mrs. Dunbar says, using her daughter's nickname and feigning merriment. "I'm here taking care of your babies." Another patchwork solution has been cobbled together in Staten Island for the Cullen family — Susan, her 2- year-old son, Tom, and her divorced parents, Karen and Bob Quinn. Mrs. Cullen, who works three days a week as a human resources administrator, did not want to put her son in day care and force him "to get used to new people" after the trauma of his father's death. So her mother, a nurse in Passaic, N.J., spends her two days off with the youngster. Until recently Mrs. Quinn baby-sat in the Cullen house. But as time passed, tension mounted between the two women, who had always had a loving and stress-free relationship. Mrs. Cullen said she was sensitive as never before to the slightest criticism from her mother, "like where I chose to put my towels." And her mother said she began to feel like she always had "my foot in my mouth." Then, Mrs. Cullen began to yearn for some privacy and Mrs. Quinn to feel like "a prisoner" in her daughter's house, unable to run errands or see her friends. A small adjustment was in order. These days Mrs. Quinn transports Tom to New Jersey for a Thursday night sleep-over. Mrs. Cullen retrieves him Friday after work. "Now I can get things done in my house," Mrs. Quinn said, "and Susan can take a bath in peace." Coverage for the third day that Mrs. Cullen works was trickier. But her father, a management consultant in Virginia, rose to the occasion. With show tunes playing on the CD player of his S.U.V., and a new E-ZPass tag on his windshield, he makes the five-hour drive north every week, arriving before his grandson goes to bed on Tuesday and heading home again late Wednesday night. His daughter's loss has given Mr. Quinn an opportunity to get to know his grandson. Cheerios and bananas for breakfast have become a ritual and Mr. Quinn, a stickler for table manners with his own children, has taught the boy to drink the leftover milk from the cereal bowl. He also breaks his longstanding rule about junk food by taking Tom to McDonald's for lunch. The weekly trips have caused some tension at home. Mr. Quinn's wife is upset that his business is suffering, he said. She also complained that he was neglectful when her father died earlier this winter. "It's a big item," he said, but not one that gives him much pause. "Moments like this call us back to the fundamentals," he said. "I'm lucky that I'm healthy and my circumstances permit me to do this. If people around me don't agree, that's fine and they're not necessarily wrong. But I have to do what my heart calls me to do." Even in situations where families can depend on hired help, there is no such thing as smooth sailing. On the North Shore of Long Island, Sharri Maio, 32, who had never lived on her own, was left with a toddler to raise and found nights in her new Roslyn Harbor home unbearable. Her mother, Joan Setty, extended an open invitation for whenever "she gets very sad." But Mrs. Maio resisted; sudden widowhood convinced her that it was "time to grow up." So, Mrs. Setty and her husband, a retired financial analyst, have hired a live-in housekeeper for their daughter. "Believe me, whatever she needs, we're fortunate, we'll give it to her," Mrs. Setty said. On the housekeeper's days off, Mrs. Maio drives to her parents with her son, Devon. When she is headed there, Mrs. Maio said, she feels "reassured and safe." When she begins the return trip, she said: "I always have an anxious feeling in my stomach. But once I get home it's O.K." The Settys once had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan and replaced it with an oceanfront apartment in Hollywood, Fla. Last winter was the first that they spent there, from January to May. This year, they went only for two weeks. Mrs. Maio said their absence "knocked the wind out of me; I was a mess." She tried to tough it out at home but wound up staying with her in-laws in New Jersey. "I don't know when we'll go back down again," Mrs. Setty said. Mrs. Setty worries that she is neglecting her older daughter, who recently had her first baby. "When you're a mother, you want to try and do for both the same," she said. "I feel pulled because I'm not giving her the attention I'd otherwise give her. But under these circumstances you can't do what you'd normally do." Instead there is the "the new normal," said Courtney Acquaviva, 31. She is one of at least 50 widows at Cantor Fitzgerald who was pregnant when the twin towers collapsed, and she now has a newborn son, as well as a daughter who is just short of her third birthday. Without her mother, Nancy Seitz, life would be impossible. Mrs. Seitz, a 55-year-old mortgage underwriter, moved into her daughter's house in Glen Rock, N.J., four and a half months ago. She took a few weeks off to "rest up for the baby," who was born on Dec. 20, and has been there ever since. Mrs. Acquaviva is mindful of her mother's sacrifices, including giving up her job and leaving her husband, a police detective in Wayne, N.J., to fend for himself. But her little girl is newly "clingy," the baby doesn't sleep through the night and "I only have two hands," Mrs. Acquaviva said. Because she elected to bottle feed the infant, her mother is able to take him in her room every other night so sleep deprivation is shared. Mrs. Acquaviva struggles with the loss of independence. "I have a lot of pride," she said, "and I don't like having to rely on someone else. But I can't be like that now."
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