Grief: Anticipating "It" and Experiencing "It"

How grief comes as an uninvited companion in life

Anticipatory Grief.

Two big words that mean something bad is about to happen.

It is the juxtaposition of these two big words that describe my inner world right now.  If you live long enough, then something bad seems to happen. It seems to be inevitable on this journey we call life. I don’t know what this bad—this hard—this loss will mean for you. It’s hard enough for my own hard to move to front and center of my life—again.

“Anticipatory grief is knowing that something bad is going to happen but it has not occurred yet.  It is the grief before the loss actually happens. This anticipation of the pending loss is a sorrow that settles into the soul and brings with it an uninvited heaviness with it.

Anticipatory grief is a state of deep, painful sorrow that occurs before an impending loss. It can affect people facing the impending death of a loved one or their own death.

The term can also be applied to a loss not associated with death, such as the anticipation of losing a breast during a mastectomy , of facing an impending divorce, or of being diagnosed with a progressive condition like Alzheimer’s Disease.”*

Take a look at the image, “Melancolie” that I posted at the beginning of my Substack. Just stare at it for a few moments before you read on.

It’s just stunning, for a number of reasons. What is captured in this image is the huge, gaping hole inside the chest. That is the picture of anyone who holds grief and the anticipation of grief. I have had the hole in me. Have you?

One a wider scale, anticipatory grief might best describe a national malaise that many are experiencing now in light of the national and global happenings. As I think of it more and more, grief might best be a term to actually describe our mood and national pulse of uneasiness trying to navigate all that we are facing these days. It seems to describe the national ethos as I look around and listen to people.

But, on a very personal level, for me, I am feeling dread. There is anxiety about all the ‘what ifs.’ There is sadness. Let me explain, if I can.

It’s where I’m at on the GPS locator today. I’m anticipating grief and holding these two big words together because my sister’s husband has been diagnosed with a terrible, incurable and incapacitating disease. There’s no cure.  He’s already lost the ability to walk. At present he’s confined to a wheel chair or a bed.  It will get worse. Soon, he will require caregivers 24/7. Now, my sister is working feverishly to line up two care-givers a day for his care.

When I read the description of his disease on the Mayo Clinic website, it’s unbearable to let those words describe what’s going to happen.  There is no cure.  There’s grief for my brother in law in all that is ahead for him.

But, it’s also a deep sense of grief for my sister.  We’ve been “Irish Twins”—a name denoting our close age, of 18 months apart. I’ve never known life with out my sister. She taught me to read; taught me how to write and taught me about being kind and loving.  I hate this for her. She doesn’t deserve this kind of devastation. Who does? The layer of grief for the one who cares and loves the one who is sick, is a different kind of sorrow and grief. But, all grief is connected within the soul.

 She’s been through so much including several major back operations where the last surgeon told my sister that she “would never walk again.”  She proved him wrong and she does walk. Now, she walks with a fused spine but with a heavy load of grief on her shoulders. It’s just so much. And, it feels like it is too much.

When you know something bad is about to happen, it’s actually hard to be present to anything else. Grief in it’s rawest leaves us paralyzed.  My friend Tom, just lost his wife of 63 years. I asked him how he felt inside. He said, “scorched.”  With one word, he aptly told me that his whole life had been leveled— razed to the ground—that he “did not recognize his life anymore.”  Anticipatory grief waits for the scorching. The scorching happens. Nothing looks right; feels right or is recognizable any more.

When our two Army sons were deployed to Iraq in the height of conflict and war, those were days of deep dread for me as well. I now say, those days of having two sons in a war zone, were the hardest season I think I’ve ever experienced as a father. I didn’t sleep. I was preoccupied. I kept looking to my driveway in anticipation of the big black car you see driving up to a home to tell the family bad news. As I look back on that time, it seems as if the only thing that really got me through was one, single verse out of the Psalms—the actual prayer book of Jesus:

When the cares of my heart are many,
    your consolations cheer my soul.—Psalm 92:19

I like how the Amplified Bible puts it:

When my anxious thoughts multiply within me,
Your comforts delight me.—Psalm 92:19

Grief multiplies within the soul of the person who is grieving. Surviving grief could make many Substacks, couldn’t it? If we all wrote our stories of grief, then we could see how pervasive and wide this river is called, the river of grief.

I also remember when our youngest son, Leighton was fighting for his life having several operations to save him from a ruptured appendix. He went “septic” as the infected appendix leaked into this gut. He spent 32 days in the Intensive Care Unit. Gwen never left his side—not once. Once, the doctor told me to “Prepare for the worse.” That was the night, I spent crying, kneeling by my bed; thrashing in my body and begging God to not take my son at thirteen years of age.  Anticipatory grief compels a person to act in ways that different—unrecognizable and out of the norm. Grief teaches us that there is no normal again. And somehow, we find the strength to not survive but for some to go beyond thriving. But, that’s not my intent here.

I’m thankful that all three lives of my sons were spared.  But this time, my brother-in -law’s life will not be spared. He’s going to die. It just hasn’t happened yet…but today I am feeling it.

Grief is Messy

Here’s the thing about grief. One grief is tied to another grief. They somehow make kinky knots inside the gut and lodge there until some tectonic plate of life shifts and you feel one grief begin to arise—then another and another. Then, moments later, another memory rises slowly to consciousness.

This week, I’ve been working on a fundraiser for my sister and brother-in-law. It’s a way to help them by making a circle of love around them to help financially. It can be devastating with all the expenses associated with long term care, as many of you know. So, writing up their story; picking the best photo to post—all seems to have stirred up this murky pot of grief, yet again.

Stages of Grief—really?

Look at these two “charts” showing the stages of grief. What’s more true is the one on the right.

All grief is connected and when one grief thread gets vibrated in the heart, all the sad music begins to play. Grief doesn’t stay in boxes with tight lids on it in the closets of our heart. It spills over like a atmospheric river, flooding you till you think you can’t breath—that you’re going to drown.

Every year when Gwen does to get her Mammogram, I feel all the flooded feelings of her breast cancer diagnosis twenty four years ago. I see her again having multiple surgeries, radiation and treatment I see me waiting in the waiting room during her surgery, alone—by myself—sitting there afraid, yet holding onto faith somehow. I saw her dying and leaving me. I saw me telling my four boys that their Mom didn’t make it. I envisioned myself raising them as a widower. The imagination can conjur the worst, can’t it?  Gwen did beat her cancer, thank God. But, what I am trying to tell you is that all the feelings and fears and losses are stored in my body. 

As we now know, the body keeps the score.  The body is where grief lodges in us. Gwen and I listened to that best selling book as an Audio Book when we drove cross country a few years ago. We had to stop listening though. Hearing the book, read by the author was just too much to take in. This happened during the time that Gwen was working through her childhood wound of being raise in a Board School in Ethiopia.  Till that time, Gwen had “successfully packed away those traumatic memories—until she couldn’t ignore them any longer. It was way too difficult to listen to because, just the listening to a book on grief made us both so physically sick, we needed to stop the car somewhere along the inter-state road in Kansas to throw up.

Years ago, some one published a book about the five predictable stages of grief. I read it; learned it; taught it and now I regret every hearing anything about five stages. It’s more messy than five stages. It’s just messy. Here’s the truth as best as I can say it now.

Grief is messy. Grief is unpredictable. It waits silently till you least expect “it” to appear and suddenly and without warning, you get triggered and you, all of a sudden find yourself crying.  This happened to me last October when I was giving a talk in front of people who all gathered to retreat for a weekend.  I had invited musicians to come led us in beautiful, instrumental arrangements of music with violin, harp and keyboard. They played a moving piece of music and lanced my own wound inside about losing my dog, Laz. I began to cry sitting there in our mountain retreat in front of dozens of people that sat lovingly and quietly as I tried to pull myself together. More tears came. And I could not stop then—even when it was my time to speak. I couldn’t speak. I just stood up feeling a Tsunami rising up within me. By the grace of God, I was able to gain my composure. Here’s the deal,though, my dog, Laz had died three years earlier. In our move across country and the transition we were facing, I had not been able to “feel” anything about his loss—until that moment when the violin, hard and keyboard were playing the most beautiful music I had ever heard. I did what many of us do when experiencing grief. I packed and packed it all inside moving on with my life until I couldn’t move on any more. My grief caught up with me as it always seems to do.

The poet. Jan Richardson put words to what I’m saying here in her poem, “Blessing for the Brokenhearted.”  It’s a haunting poem about the subtleties of grief. Richardson, lost her husband unexpectedly, yet she captures this grief, so, so well—perhaps too, well if that be possible. This is a poem to keep. I wish I could write like her but let me clear, I do not want to have to experience this grief to qualify me to do so. This poem if from her book: The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for the Times of Grief.

*https://www.verywellhealth.com/understanding-anticipatory-grief-and-symptoms-2248855

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

by Jan Richardson


Let us agree 
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better to have this pain
than to have done without this love.

Let us promise 
we will not 
tell ourselves 
time will heal
the wound,
when ever day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough 
to simply marvel 
at the mystery
of how a heart 
so broken
can go on beating
as if it were made
for precisely this--

As if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it.

As if it sees
the heart's sole remedy 
for breaking
is to love still.

As if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot begin to fathom
but will save us nonetheless.

---

I’ll be going on a Silent Retreat for the next three days deep into the mountains. It will be a time of reflection, writing, rest and being alone. This retreat comes at a good time. I look forward to it and am hopeful and expectant.

Lent begins next week. Here’s the link to the Guide I wrote which is a creative and simply way to practice Lent by reflecting each day on one, single question; to move your body by walking for one mile, if you can; and to do this for the 40 Days of Lent which begins February 15.