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Key points
- The grief experience can begin before a loved one dies.
- The emotions associated with anticipatory grief are as intense as any loss experience.
- Contending with anticipatory grief over many years takes a toll.
Most people think of grief as something that happens after a loved one’s death. But grieving can also occur before and during the process of saying goodbye.
Katherine A. Sherbrooke is the author of three novels, including Leaving Coy’s Hill, a fictional account of the real-life of Lucy Stone. Her new novel, The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly, is partly inspired by Sherbrooke’s mother’s early life. We recently spoke about her mother, the phenomenon of anticipatory grief, and the toll of long goodbyes on families.
Lynne: Mourning is often discussed in the context of the experience of deep sadness after a loved one has died. However, anticipatory grief refers to myriad feelings of grief that present before and during an impending loss. Had you known about this nuance-related grief and loss?
Katherine: I thought grief happens after death when everyone gets to talk about what they loved and admired about a person. When everyone is allowed to have their faces blotched with sorrow for a few days, and when hugs among family and friends silently communicate the depth of the loss. But I had been flailing in those depths for over ten years.
For me, the beginning of my mother’s long, slow decline started with a phone call from my sister. “I don’t think you should leave the baby alone with Mom,” she’d said. I was stunned. On the verge of delivering my first child, I was looking forward to my mother’s arrival. As she had done for my older siblings, she would swoop in and cook beautiful meals, expertly organize the nursery, and lovingly show me how to swaddle and calm my new baby. We would talk for hours about raising good kids, just the two of us, and she would whisper to me all the secrets stored in her invisible guidebook on motherhood.
Lynne: How did that revelation impact the idyllic experience you had hoped for?
Katherine: It was difficult to absorb at first. Rather than having pure mother-daughter time, my father accompanied my mother on that trip so she wouldn’t become lost in the airport. Sensing my mother’s limitations, my husband took more time off work to help with the baby. I’d had a C-section and couldn’t yet walk stairs or carry our son very far without fatigue. Everyone but me seemed to see what I refused to believe. My mother was already starting to slip away from us.
Lynne: Once you realized that your mother’s health was impaired and your relationship would change, how did you contend with your new reality?
Katherine: It was all so gradual that I was able to avoid facing reality at first. Like happens for so many, my mother’s command over her thoughts and emotions eroded like a glacier. The initial evaporation is almost imperceptible, the eventual diminishment impossible to miss. She progressed from losing her way home from the grocery store to forgetting how to get from my kitchen into my dining room. When my father started to take her to his tennis games so she wouldn’t be home alone, she would sometimes wander out onto the court, perhaps wondering why he was standing so far from her in that big empty room with the green floor.
By the time my son was six, my father reluctantly admitted he couldn’t continue to care for her on his own. By the time my son turned eight, my mother could no longer speak in sentences. Though I desperately wanted to talk to her.
I had a litany of questions about how to be a good mother, how to raise a happy family. The age span of my siblings was so great that my mother had had at least one child under the age of 18 under her roof for 36 years, five in total. She was a black belt, and I was very green. I had two sons by then, and I had so many much to discuss with her. How do I balance discipline with encouragement? How do I know if distraction in school is a typical boy thing or a real concern? Did she feel guilty leaving us when she traveled? Was I making a mistake keeping up such an intense work schedule? Was she glad to be there when we got off the bus every day, or did she feel she had missed out on a precious part of her life?
Lynne: How did you cope with not being able to have these conversations and missing her when she was sitting right in front of you?
Katherine: At first, I coped, if you can call it that, by avoiding my feelings. I honestly didn’t recognize what an enormous effect this loss, happening right in front of me, was having on my mental state. I stopped working full-time when my eldest turned ten and found myself to be constantly weepy. Sappy movies required a full box of Kleenex, and touching lyrics forced me to clench my throat. My boys would sneak looks at me and tentatively ask if I was okay. I thought it could be chalked up to being in the middle of a major professional transition, finally allowing myself to relax after 14 years of building a business. I thought maybe it was the anxiety of not knowing what the next stage of my career looked like. Why else would I be in such a puddle all the time?
Lynne: How did you finally put a name or an idea to what you were experiencing?
Katherine: A dear friend finally suggested that I might be grieving for my mother. Initially, I pushed the idea aside. How could I be grieving if my mother was still alive? Grieving comes after death. But my friend was not willing to let me off the hook that easily. She reminded me that I had always seen my mother as a readily available source of unconditional love—how could I not be feeling that loss acutely? But I was afraid that if I started to cry, I would never stop. My friend eventually helped me see that I was more likely to drown from the inside if I kept fighting my feelings. So I finally let go and wept.
Lynne: For many, the ups and downs of this emotional and prolonged period of grief can’t be sustained. Did you learn anything surprising along the way?
Katherine: Yes, I began to see that my vast well of grief housed many emotions. Some didn’t surprise me, like anger and fear. But I was shocked to find so many other emotions swirling in those waters, including hope, love, and joy. It turns out that not letting myself grieve had been akin to not letting myself feel. Once I let myself do both, my whole world went from fuzzy and grey back to crisp Technicolor, as if the windshield into my life had been rinsed clean.
My mother died 14 years after the onset of her dementia, four years after I had started to let myself feel this very specific kind of pain. I can’t say that those four years made her actual death any easier to accept when it came. But finally, allowing myself to really feel again gave me back my life, with all its scalding waters and refreshing streams, and I’m forever grateful for that insight.
