Anticipating Grief

I knew i was grieving when my son died and all i wanted to do was lay in a dark room for hours staring at the wall. I didn’t think I would survive the loss of him. That was 4 years ago.

I knew I was grieving when I woke up post transplant, the liver inside my body not the one i went under with, nor the one i anticipated being there, completely incapacitated and suddenly torn away from everything i thought would be. That was nearly 2 years ago.

I know grief. I know the cry your eyes out, lay in bed, catatonic state, desperately wishing to be numb grief.

And then there’s the grief of being 4 years, and 2 years, out from the hardest days of your life drinking coffee on the couch. The feeling of no resolution. I called it liminal space, the in between. I never knew to call it grieving.

Anticipatory grief can also be defined as grieving a loved one while they are still alive. It is common in the realm of terminal diagnosis’. And if we don’t talk about grief in general, anticipatory grief is the thing locked in the cupboard no one knows exists.

We live in a society that very much aligns with the idea that grief occurs after a death, there is an acceptable grieving window, and then life continues. Sometimes i wonder what it would be like to live in a world that was more in tune with grieving as a practice. Not an event, a brief blip in the timeline, something to be rushed past, but a practice we return to over and over. I practice my grief the same way I practice yoga, the same way the wise ones talk about having a spiritual practice. Grief as something we return to time and time again, learning from it, refusing to be released until it teaches us what we need to know.

I am in a continual dance with grief. Some days it looks like emotional detachment, feelings of alienation, lack of groundedness in reality. I was talking with someone today about a mutual friend, and how they never announced their pregnancy after loss until the baby was born, as if the lack of announcing would lessen the devestation if this pregnancy also ended in loss. It looks like the idea of “don’t get too attached” and as if by saying this we prevent the pain if this ends not as we hoped. It’s not getting your hopes up, going over the bad news before its even been delivered. It’s the daily living knowing your body didn’t do what so many others do without second thought.

After losing Paris, a fellow loss mom sent me a pin that said “grieving hearts need hugs and cookies.” In the note she talked about how she wanted to wear a sign that let others know she was grieving.

(I spent over half an hour trying to come up with that last sentence. My brain doesn’t string sentences together like it used to, and Cody and I often jokingly say my brain is a big game of madlib. I often mix stories together, or forget huge details. If I come across like an airhead sometimes, it genuinely is because my brain doesn’t connect dots. I grieve this too).

I used to have a dream about the girl I would be one day. She’d travel and get married, have a career and have babies. I have to grieve that girl, who never got that. In order to embrace what is, I have to grieve what never could be. And all the times the pain was masked over with false promises rather than someone telling me what it takes to grieve well.

I want to wear a sign that says “Be gentle with me: I’m grieving.” Because i am. always and forever. I am in a perpetual state of grieving, and if i don’t learn to grieve well I’ll never learn to live well, to love well.

So grief, come in. Let me pour you a cup of tea. Teach me what I need to know.