Anticipatory grief

... of, of life.

And that, that is definitely hard to watch as a, a, an adult child, and what that evokes is, um, this phenomenon of anticipatory grief, right? Your person hasn't died yet, but you're already grieving the loss of who they are-

Yeah

... who they were, and you're, you're grieving the loss of what your relationship to them was.

I got to the point where I was like, "Okay, let's get you in for a test, Dad.

We...

Uh, I'm thinking [laughs] maybe we gotta take care of this." Um, but yeah, so but that anticipatory grief I think is really hard, and we don't recognize it 'cause we're not talking about it as much anymore.

Mm-hmm.

Life didn't stop just because grief happened.

So the conversation we're having today, we're talking about anticipatory grief, parenting through loss, how do you recognize signs from the beyond, and what happens when one life ends but you're growing another.

Mary Elise, I'm so glad that you're here.

Thank you, Ryan.

So when we were chatting before, you shared with me that part of the hardest parts of your grief journey was, was, was that he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

Mm-hmm.

So what did anticipatory grief look like for you?

It's such an interesting question because, yes, there was the anticipatory grief related to his Parkinson's diagnosis, but because he was 50 when I was born, I, I think on some level I always felt like I was gonna lose him too early.

Yeah

... we all start facing what we call anticipatory grief, meaning we know when that person dies we are going to be sad.

Yeah.

It's just, that's just how it is.

And so we call that grief that we're thinking about.

And that I remember, I remember so well specifically with my mom because, you know, that was going to be one of my first main losses, and the anticipatory grief was horrific.

Mm-hmm.

Then just going through it was really hard.

But grief is not just about losing a person, isn't that right? We can experience grief for lots of different things.

I did just say there, like, the loss of yourself the loss of your identity the loss of my job the loss of my womb the loss of friendships I have lost people post and I wonder is it me did I change or is it they couldn't meet me where where I needed them to meet me post grief or and not just when she died like there's that anticipatory grief and I remember when she first got diagnosed this is and she was in remission then and we'd done the whole stint we stayed in St Luke's together um Me and her friend Sarah split it.

It was wild.

My parents at Seamus and it was eight weeks where she Monday to Friday stayed in St. Luke's Lodge.

That's typically the picture that has been painted for us.

And what I realized along the way was that this sense of anticipatory grief.

is, and this is just my opinion and I'm not a psychologist nor a grief expert, but from having done many, many interviews and from my own experience, I actually think it's a really important part of the process.

And I say in my book that I wrote about this experience, I say, I love hope, but I actually don't think hope is super helpful in a terminal illness setting.

Whereas optimism is that we can get as much time as humanly possible, we can juice as much out of the experience as humanly possible.

And we can choose to have optimism in how we look at this period of time in our lives.

And that is what I think anticipatory grief really is simply accepting that there is a strong chance, if not a 100% chance, because we're all going the same way, right? that you are going to lose this person.

And the big death walkers, the big death doulas in this country will say that you always set a place for death at the table.

Does that make sense?

Actually, there's a term for that, and it's anticipatory grief.

Okay.

And we do work on that as well.

Mm-hmm

... and it's hard to talk about these things, but it is a reality, and it's more important that we do talk about these things because the more we can normalize having these conversations, the, the better care we can provide to individuals who are going through this.

So anticipatory grief is a very important part of that process where their fears can bring their concerns, and that allows them to be able to show up better-

Mm-hmm