Ep #380: Anticipatory Grief: When You Started Grieving Before He Died

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 380: Anticipatory Grief: When You Started Grieving Before He Died.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today I want to talk about anticipatory grief because for some widows, grief didn’t start the day their person died, it started months before, sometimes years before. Your husband had cancer or another terminal illness. Maybe there was a long period of decline. You watched dementia or another disease slowly change the person that you loved.

You knew death was coming, even if you didn’t know exactly when. And during that time, you were already experiencing loss. You were grieving your old life, your relationship as it used to be, the things you could no longer do together, the future you were probably beginning to realize that you weren’t going to have. And then your person died, and maybe you wondered, shouldn’t I have been more prepared for this? I knew it was coming. I’ve already been grieving for so long. Why does this still feel so hard?

So today let’s talk about what anticipatory grief actually is, what it can look like, and why knowing someone is going to die does not mean you somehow get to finish grieving them before they’re gone.

So first, what is anticipatory grief? Anticipatory grief is grief that happens before a loss has fully occurred. When someone you love is seriously ill or declining, there can be many losses before the death itself. Your roles change. Maybe your partner becomes someone you’re caring for. Conversations change, physical intimacy changes, travel becomes impossible, they stop working, their personality or cognitive abilities change. You take over responsibilities they always handled. Your world gets smaller. The future you had been picturing together starts disappearing one piece at a time.

Not every widow will experience all of those things, of course, but those are real losses. And your brain and body can respond to those losses with grief even though your person is still alive. This can be incredibly confusing because you can grieve someone who is still here. We tend to think of grief as something that begins after a death, but grief is our response to loss.

My favorite definition is that grief is the natural human response to a perceived loss. And if your person was sick for a long time, you likely experienced a lot of loss before they actually died. You can miss who they used to be while sitting right next to them. You can grieve the relationship you used to have while still loving the relationship you have now. And you can feel devastated by what is happening and grateful that they are still here. You can desperately want more time with them and also wonder how much longer you can keep doing this. Those things can all be true at the same time because grief is complicated that way.

And anticipatory grief can come with guilt for some of us. This is a big one. Did you ever catch yourself imagining what life would be like after they died and then feel terrible for thinking about it? Perhaps part of you wanted the uncertainty to be over. Caregiving was exhausting. Watching them suffer was unbearable. You found yourself wishing the end would come and then immediately thought, what kind of person thinks that?

And I want you to know that the answer to that question is a human one. Thinking about the end when you know the end is coming doesn’t mean you wanted your person to die. Feeling exhausted doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. Wanting their suffering to end doesn’t mean you wanted to lose them. And feeling relief after they died doesn’t mean that you’re relieved that they’re dead. You can be relieved that they’re no longer suffering, relieved that you’re no longer waiting for the next crisis, relieved that you don’t have to watch them deteriorate, relieved that they can finally sleep. Relief and grief can exist in the same body. One does not cancel out the other.

And sometimes we think, but I knew it was coming. And I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions about anticipatory grief. We assume that knowing someone is going to die should somehow make the death easier. And in some ways, having time to prepare can be helpful. You might have had conversations you wanted to have. You might have made some practical arrangements. There might have been some opportunities to say the things that you wanted to say. You knew intellectually that death was coming. But knowing something is going to happen and then living in the reality after it has happened are two very different experiences.

So you can know your person is going to die and still have absolutely no idea what it will actually feel like to wake up the next morning and know that they’re gone because you haven’t lived that part yet. You haven’t experienced the empty chair. You haven’t made the first decision you would normally have discussed with them. You haven’t had the first birthday after their death or the first death anniversary. You haven’t reached for your phone to text them and then remembered. And there are secondary losses you can’t fully understand until they actually happen. It’s just how it works.

So no, anticipatory grief doesn’t mean you’ve already done your grief. There is also no grief credit system where the months or years that you spent grieving before the death get somehow deducted from what you experience afterward. It would be nice, but that’s not how it works.

So anticipatory grief doesn’t mean your grief should be shorter. This is another thought I really want you to watch out for, something like, I was grieving for two years before he died, so shouldn’t I be further along by now? Further along? Further along according to whom? Grief is not a project with a predetermined number of hours required. The grief you experienced before the death is not identical to the grief that you’re experiencing now. Before the death, you were grieving while your person was still physically here. After the death, you’re adapting to an entirely different reality.

So if your brain is using anticipatory grief against you, I should be handling this better, I should have been prepared, I’ve already had years to process this, notice those thoughts. They are thoughts. They are not rules about how grief is supposed to work. They are not facts. You don’t have to take them so seriously. You could know death was coming and still hope it wouldn’t, right?

Anticipatory grief also doesn’t mean that you fully accepted that your person was going to die, even if you knew they were going to die. I think it’s a beautiful thing that human brains can hold such contradictory things at the same time. You can understand that there is a particular prognosis and still hope that they’re the exception. You can hear what the doctors are saying and still wonder if something will change or if it could be different. You can know hospice has been called and still struggle to comprehend that this person you love is actually going to be gone. There’s nothing unusual or weird or wrong about that. Intellectually understanding that death is coming and emotionally comprehending the reality of it are just very different things.

It’s also important to remember that your nervous system was probably working on overdrive. I want you to think about what your body was experiencing during that period. It doesn’t really even matter how long. But if you spent months or years waiting for bad news, managing medical crises, watching symptoms, caring for someone, sleeping lightly because you needed to listen for them, wondering whether today was going to be the day, your nervous system spent a lot of time responding to stress and uncertainty. And then the death happens, and the emergency is technically over, but your body doesn’t necessarily get that memo immediately. Some widows continue to feel really keyed up. Others crash. You might feel completely exhausted. You might feel numb. Sleep might still be difficult even though you no longer need to listen for them.

So what you’re experiencing after the death isn’t necessarily only about the death itself. Your body could also be responding to that prolonged stress that came before it. You also don’t need to compare your grief. And I see this a lot. I don’t want you comparing your loss to someone whose person died suddenly. As someone who lost their person suddenly, I have been on the receiving end of this a lot, and so I see it, right, where someone will say to me, well, you know, I’m so sorry that they were taken so quickly from you. At least I got to say goodbye. You know, I shouldn’t complain.

And then, on the other end, someone who lost their person unexpectedly might then think, well, at least she got to prepare. I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Neither comparison is useful. Sudden loss has its challenges. Anticipated loss has its challenges. One is not automatically easier or harder or better or worse than the other. And you don’t have to prove that yours was harder in order for it to have been hard. And telling yourself that it’s easier sometimes backfires because then you’re dismissing all the ways that it was hard.

So, how do you carry anticipatory grief? First, you recognize that you’re grieving more than the death itself. Sometimes we just think about the actual death. But you’re grieving so much more than that. There can be grief for the years that were shaped by the illness and the relationship that you had before all of the caregiving, all of the plans that slowly disappeared, things that your person lost before they died, things that you lost before they died, parts of yourself that got put on hold while you were taking care of everything else. Name those losses. Let them count because they do. And give yourself permission to stop using the fact that you “knew” as evidence that somehow you should be better at this. You couldn’t completely prepare for a life you hadn’t lived yet.

And if relief is there, let relief be there. If sadness is there, let sadness be there. If you’re angry, let yourself feel angry. If you’re exhausted, pay attention to that too. Take care of yourself. You don’t need to choose the emotion that seems most appropriate for a widow. You actually get to have the emotions that are in your body, the ones that you’re really having.

And when your brain starts telling you what you should be feeling because of how your person died or when they died, notice that too. You can question those thoughts. And then you can keep figuring out what you need next, what you need now, because the caregiving chapter is over, the waiting is over, the constant anticipating is over, and now you’re learning how to live in a reality that you could imagine before, but that you had never actually experienced, and you don’t need to rush yourself through that.

Before we go, if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, okay, what do I actually do with my grief? I want to invite you to a new free class. Going to be teaching why some of the things we’ve been told about grief aren’t particularly useful, what actually helps us get better at grief, and some practical tools that can make widowhood easier. It’s completely free. You can register at CoachingWithKrista.com/freeclass. CoachingWithKrista.com/freeclass. I would love to see you there.

All right, that’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care, and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence.

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.