Story by Joe Pisani
My daughter has been pestering me lately. She insists that grandparents live longer when they take care of their grandkids, according to several studies. Even before I could refute her research, she said, “I’m dropping Gabe off this afternoon.”
Not to mention the next afternoon and the weekend. I guess she’s trying to add years to my life, although I find it suspicious that she discovered this research the same day she needed a babysitter.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t find research that said grandkids are stressful for grandparents. No one has looked into that because they’re probably afraid of the uproar it would cause.
I know many grandparents who are powers of example, and I pray every night I can be more like them. Our friends Silvana and Franco go to every one of their grandsons’ basketball games, and they get so worked up, they yell at the referees and risk getting high blood pressure. (I can’t do that. I’m in bed by 8 on weekends and 7 on weekdays.)
The so-called experts also insist that babysitting grandkids gives new life to aging brains.
“These interactions improve memory, language, reasoning and critical thinking skills,” one study concluded. An Australian report found that grandmothers who watched their grandkids one day a week could improve their memory scores and reduce the possibility of getting Alzheimer’s.
And grandparents who babysit supposedly live up to 37 percent longer, and half of them are likely to be alive five years more than other seniors.
But to my thinking, there’s much more to the story because the values that grandparents can impart to their grandchildren is incalculable.
In one of his last writings, Pope Francis reflected on aging and dying in a preface he wrote for a book titled Awaiting a New Beginning: Reflections on Old Age by Cardinal Angelo Scola. He said that old age, despite infirmities and other challenges, can be “truly fruitful and capable of radiating goodness, lived as a grace, and not with resentment.”
“To say ‘old’ does not mean ‘to be discarded,’ as a degraded culture of waste sometimes leads us to think,” the pope wrote. “Saying ‘old’ instead means sharing experience, wisdom, knowledge, discernment, thoughtfulness, listening, slowness. Values of which we are in great need!”
He also stressed the role of grandparents in the “balanced development of the young.” “Amid the frenzy of our societies, often devoted to the ephemeral and the unhealthy taste for appearances, the wisdom of grandparents becomes a shining beacon, shedding light on uncertainty and providing direction to grandchildren, who can draw from their experience something ‘extra’ for their daily lives,” he said.
Every semester in my public speaking class, I ask students to write a two-minute speech on the topic “If you could take anyone to dinner, living or dead, who would it be and why?” There are the usual selections, such as Taylor Swift and soccer player Christiano Ronaldo and occasionally one of the Kardashians, but for the most part, the people they choose are more meaningful — an estranged father, a deceased mother and more often a grandparent who helped raise them because their parents had to work or were gone. The lessons grandparents taught them are always life changing and life affirming and so powerful that the students remember them years after their grandparents have passed.
When I was young, my grandmother raised me on the East Side of Bridgeport. I still remember how every afternoon she baked two sweet potatoes for us. While I lay on the kitchen floor with my crayons and coloring book, she sat nearby in her rocking chair in front of the oven, praying her rosary until she dozed off. When she woke, the potatoes were ready.
She was an Italian immigrant widowed at a young age, who raised nine children during the Great Depression without any safety net. I didn’t always understand what she was saying in her broken English, but I knew that she radiated love, warmth and Christ.
Recently, I visited her grave at St. Michael Cemetery in Stratford, with a weathered statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on top of the stone. I took a pair of rosary beads out of my pocket, which someone had given me, and wrapped them around the statue for her because I’m convinced she’s still praying for all of us from heaven.
You see, grandparents are forever. A gift from God.