The Grief Before they’re Gone

I’ve become familiar with anticipatory grief, the process of grieving a loss before it actually happens. I wasn’t sure if it was something I’d write about, but I’ve always found writing helpful for making sense of the world.

When someone is really ill, time does strange things to you. In some moments it feels like you’ve fallen out of time, like you are stuck in one place as the world keeps moving around you. This new time you live in moves slowly. You wake up, you check in with people, and time just is.

But you also feel a sense of urgency. Time is limited. Time is always moving too quickly. There is never enough time. You wonder if there’s some way you can bargain for more of it, some word you can say that will grant you just a few more moments. And then comes along the guilt. You sit in bed watching Netflix and then realise that you’ve spent three hours doing that, three hours that you’ll never get back. Did you waste those hours? Are they hours that you will regret later? Could you have used them more wisely? More meaningfully?

In films, when a person is dying, every moment is spent rushing around or sitting with that person or being very emotional and making grand gestures. That’s nothing like the reality of it, or at least, not in my admittedly limited experience. You still do the laundry. You still wash dishes. You still eat dinner and attempt to write your dissertation and send emails. You still laugh. You still watch pointless YouTube videos. You still chat to your friends about who is dating who and laugh over silly jokes. Sometimes you forget to eat dinner. Sometimes you look at the pile of laundry, mutter “fuck this” and curl up in a heap on the sofa. But for the most part your life is filled with the ordinary events that it always was.

Sometimes, you don’t get to spend every minute with that person even if you might want to. They need rest. They need to eat. And if they’re in a hospital, you may not have a choice but to wait until you can see them. Covid has changed the landscape of how we interact with medical services, and this includes when a loved one is in the hospital.

I started this post by mentioning grief and then meandered off to talk about everything but the grieving. The grief is there. I don’t think it’s something you feel all of the time, or at least it isn’t in my case. It comes and goes like the tide. For me, it finds me in the night, when I’m trying to sleep. During the day I’m often so busy I don’t have time to be sad. That doesn’t mean I’m ok or in any way happy with this reality. And I do feel guilty for not feeling sad all of the time, like I’ve somehow failed, even though I know that thinking like this is ridiculous. But at night I don’t have tasks to occupy me and so the full reality of what is happening comes down on me.

There’s also the difficulty of not knowing how to talk about it. People don’t want to talk about death. We view it as something to fear and hide from. But it’s such an inevitable part of all of our lives. People grieve differently. For some people, mentioning the person who is dying is too painful and awful. They can’t bring themselves to do it. But for other people it’s very healing to recognise that person. To acknowledge how ill they are whilst also remembering who they were before that. This is the kind of person I am. I’m a talker, and apparently the prospect of loss hasn’t changed that. But I also struggle with wanting people to say the right things. I hate when people say they hope they will get better. They won’t, and it’s a sad reality that we must accept. But at the same time I know they are just trying to be kind and that our society does a dreadful job of preparing any of us to navigate death.

There is no perfect way to do this, because the situation itself is one none of us want to find ourselves in. I’m choosing to live as normally as I can. Today, this means returning to Leeds after three days at home, at least for a little while. I’ll be going home again and probably very soon. But I’ve realised that sitting still and waiting for something to happen, when I can’t even go to the hospital to pay a visit is pointless. I’m pulling myself out of my routine and into a space where I can’t contribute anything and where I’m just waiting and waiting. And this isn’t helpful for me.

I know there are other people who need the exact opposite. Who need quiet, or the familiarity of family, or who can’t go out because it feels like too much. And I think you have to do what feels right for you. But the grief you feel in the months and weeks leading up to a death is real. It hurts. It isn’t something I know what to do with. So all I’m doing for now is keeping on living as normal a life as I possibly can, because that feels right in this moment.