Why Doesn't Anyone Talk About Anticipatory Grief?

For the past six years, I've been living with a bit of a secret...and lot of anticipatory grief. I won't go into the details, because while I believe in talking about the taboo stuff, this is ultimately not my story to tell.

But here's what I can talk about: My own experience with this particular situation. And the reality of my experience is this: I've been grieving someone who is still alive. Someone who I know I will lose in the most ultimate sense of the word, maybe in a matter of weeks or months or years. I have no way of knowing when it'll come; I just know that the sadness is already very much here.

This isn't an uncommon experience. Dementia, ALS, cancer...there are so many conditions that come with a period of anticipatory grief, for both the patient and their loved ones. Yesterday, I interviewed a grief expert for the podcast I co-host, and she said something that kind of blew my mind: Anticipatory grief can be two-fold. It may not just feel like you're anticipating this loss, it also feels like you're grieving a version of that person that is already gone.

Even though I've been living this reality for a while, I hadn't heard it laid out like this, and I think that's because people just don't talk about anticipatory grief — even though so many of us are experiencing it.

Part of it, I guess, is that we live in a world of "it could always be worse". With anticipatory grief, a lot of us probably feel like "well, the person is still technically here", and so we fear that the world will invalidate our feelings. Because, well, "it could be worse". You could be firmly in the non-anticipatory grief stage.

But things don't have the be the worst case scenario in order for them to be hard. Anticipatory grief is real, it's heavy, it is both incredibly sad and deeply uncertain, and it deserves more attention. Because it can feel really isolating, even when you know you aren't the only one feeling it.