Q: My sister-in-law phoned last week just before we were to spend the night with her at their place and said, “you can’t stay here; we are having a problem with our family.”
She was so upset on the telephone that I could not help but press her a bit to find out what was going on.
Apparently, her little granddaughter is filled with tumours and at that time had been in the hospital for a little more than two weeks. The little girl’s mom and dad had asked my sister and brother-in-law to come over to their house to help manage things while they were back and forth to the hospital. My sister-in-law asked that I keep all of this to myself.
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The little girl’s mom and dad are trying to keep the matter private and confidential, but of course, it slipped.
We still needed a place to stay and in my efforts to call on someone else to help us, I told one of my other sisters about the problems elsewhere. She, in turn, took this as a whole family problem and let the word out to the rest of the family. “How would you feel,” she said, “if something happened to the little girl and we had to tell the rest of our family without anyone else being prepared for what could be overwhelming bad news?”
I can see her point, but I also think that I could have listened more to my sister-in-law and not said anything about her unwell granddaughter. I do not know if I was right or wrong to have told my sister about the little girl’s illness. What do you think?
A: I think that you are in a terrible position. If you tell anyone about the little girl’s illness your sister-in-law is going to be angry at you. If you don’t tell, then your own sister will be angry at you. You are, as they say, between a rock and a hard place.
The problem is that the little girl is very seriously ill and could possibly be terminal. I don’t think that anything ignites our base emotions as powerfully as does a terminally ill child. I have no doubt that you were very upset when your sister-in-law told you about her little granddaughter, just as she was upset as she was telling you about it. The question for you is what are you to do with all of those powerful feelings? You cannot just sit on them and hope that they will not overwhelm you. That is what they did, isn’t it? Neither do you want to do anything but respect the parents and grandparents of the sick child.
My hope is that you have someone in your life who will listen to you with at least some degree of objectivity.
Do you have a life-long friend with whom you have shared your personal feelings over the years? Do you have confidence in either your minister or your family physician to talk to either of them about the little girl? Is there a professional counsellor around who would listen to you as you try to come to terms with this thing?
You need to talk to someone and that someone needs to be outside of your family constellation. Your goal is to find some kind of peace within yourself even when dealing with such horrible news. The more you are able to come to terms with the little girl and her mom and her dad, the greater are the chances that you will honour their request for privacy and confidentiality and let them decide who and when they will share their struggles.
