Uneven Aging: Anticipatory grief
In addition to the asymmetry of Uneven Aging, when one partner retains good health and the other has a setback, there lurks another divide: that between a temporary and long-term situation. It is one thing care for a partner or friend with a hip replacement, another to support one with a terminal diagnosis.
Hope is like oxygen: when you have it, it lifts even low days, and without it, you struggle to even breathe.
As I write, I think of Susan K., who died of breast cancer. Even when she knew all options had been exhausted, she did not, as her husband Ben told me, "want friends to think there was no hope". But when we met in a café, she gestured widely, a movement that flung her wedding ring off her finger. We exchanged a look. She said, "What's left to do is finish things with Ben." She gave me many gifts of friendship; her final one was candour.
I was as close to him as to her. Ben had been quietly mourning this impending loss while he tried to preserve normal family life for their teenaged sons, Joe and Morgan. During that year, Ben, a flight controller, began having problems at work. He performed the technical aspect of the job proficiently, but his collegial manner evaporated. His manager suggested counselling, where Ben learned about what is sometimes called "white grief", the mourning that happens while the loved one is still living.
While grief counsellors are familiar with it, family and friends are usually not, so their good-hearted impulse is to manufacture hope. One friend approached Ben at a high school football game and pressed some contraband Mexican medication into his hands, saying, "Joe needs his mother!"
I was not exempt; Susie and I spent hours exchanging links to custom-made wigs, though I sensed she was unlikely to get much use from one.
Typical expressions of anticipatory grief include the emotional (sadness, anger, blame-laying); cognitive (confusion, memory loss, disorientation); and physical (fatigue, loss of appetite, flare-ups of health issues). The grieving partner may withdraw from the friend circle and even from family.
Anyone facing grief is in a room with a prowling tiger—so, is it not weird to pretend otherwise? Thanks to the counselling, Ben realized that because he had suppressed his grief, he had been avoiding a crucial decision: should he try to keep Susie at home, or arrange admission to a hospice? He described the moments after they chose a hospice and sat in silence holding hands, as "one of the closest times of our life together."
That's only one story, and no one's situation is the same. Some persons will deny themselves any hint of anticipatory grief, because others are telling them to "stay strong" or "think positively". If you have been through loss yourself, you know how lame this advice can sound at a certain point.
At Susie's memorial, Joe said that over the past year, each day had been a fresh heartbreak, and now that she was gone, he felt immense gratitude for his years with her. He looked first at his sons, then the crowd, and said, "We know how much she loved us. That sustains us still, and always will."
If you are in the midst of anticipatory grief yourself, don't assume carrying the grief alone now will toughen you up for later; it doesn't unfold that way. A bereavement counsellor can help; if it's more convenient, consider phone sessions. Grief is its own majestic, complex and unavoidable state that is embedded in life with those we love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
As if it were winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter there is a winter so endless
that your heart, surviving it, will be able to endure.
climbing praising as you return to connection.
Here, among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.
the endless ground of your own deep pulse,
so that you can fully experience it just this once.
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