GRANDPARENTS | ABANDONMENT

My Daughter’s Grandparents Cut Her From Their Lives

I’ll never understand it now that I’m a grandparent

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My daughter, Morgan, had just turned sixteen when my twenty-two-year marriage to her father was over. It was a brutal ending. We didn’t see it coming. In a single weekend, a secret was revealed, and then he was gone. I liken it to how the poor peasants of Pompeii must have felt in the last seconds of life, being covered in a blanket of ash and debris before their minds could register what was happening.

Sounds dramatic. It was. The city of Pompeii was preserved forever. And I guess, in a sense, my first marriage is preserved in the stories I now tell. It will go down in my family history as the most traumatic thing Morgan had to endure.

At thirty-four, this is still true for her and all that came with it.

Her father, George, was her world for the first fifteen years of her life. Because George was the only child of Greek parents, Dimitri and Julie, Morgan was like a rare jewel in the crown of his family line.

Never had a child been more cherished. The way they fussed over her, you’d think she had royal blood. Like some precious…