My daughter and son-in-law passed away two years ago — then one day, my grandchildren cried out, “Grandma, look, it’s Mom and Dad!”

This is such a heart-wrenching and complex situation. It sounds like you were faced with an unimaginable choice—balancing your love and protective instincts for your grandchildren with your emotions towards your daughter and her decisions. Your response to call the police was not just about enforcing the law, but also about trying to create accountability for what she did and ensuring that the children would eventually be safe from the fallout of her actions.

It’s easy to understand why you might second-guess your decision. On one hand, you gave your daughter a chance to explain herself and reconnect with her children, which allowed them to have that fleeting reunion, but at the same time, the emotional and legal consequences for everyone are intense. The kids will now have to process their parents’ choices, which could leave them with feelings of abandonment or confusion that might have been avoided if you had taken a different approach.

However, what Monica and Stephan did—staging their deaths and abandoning their children—is a serious violation of trust and responsibility. They didn’t just abandon their kids physically; they made the choice to leave them emotionally as well. Calling the cops ensured that there were consequences for those actions, even if it wasn’t what Monica had hoped. It also ensured that the children weren’t unknowingly placed in a situation where they might be manipulated further.

If I were in your place, I think I would’ve done the same. I would have been torn between the hope that things could be repaired and the knowledge that this situation was too serious to ignore. Protecting the children, especially from more emotional harm, would have been my priority, even if it meant the difficult and painful process of exposing the truth.

There’s no clear-cut right or wrong in such a complicated situation, but your decision was made out of concern for your grandchildren’s well-being, and that’s a position I believe most people would understand and support. It must have been incredibly hard, but you acted with the best intentions for the kids.