Pre-Grieving: A Down Payment You Don't Want to Make

The idea of grieving in anticipation of loss was new to me, even though I think I did it.

My 13-year-old is a lot more like me than my wife, so much so that my wife has taken the strategy of “How would I talk to Jared?” when approaching her about various topics.

One of these traits the girl has learned is how to be observant without tipping her hand. It’s an introvert’s secret weapon, allowing you to blend in and collect information without being noticed.

Anyhow, my wife was the one who broke the news to her about the terminality of my father-in-law’s illness. She reacted as expected, which is to say that she cried hysterically. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but this marked her first experience with death among her family members. She is/was far closer to my in-laws than my father and stepmother, while my six-year-old is the opposite.) After all, he had just been to our house over Memorial Day weekend and now, less than two weeks later, the news was bleak.

While mom and daughter were talking, I was on my phone sending an email to the therapist to let her know what was happening because I thought it needed to be a topic of discussion for that week’s looming appointment.

As tends to happen, the appointment ended and my daughter shuffled off to the bathroom. While chatting with the therapist, she pointed out two things:

1. My daughter had sensed something was up. There were a lot of hushed conversations and phone calls taken by my wife on earbuds. Like a good little introverted assassin, she hid in the bushes and took everything in.

2. She got the sense that my daughter was pre-grieving; that she had already begun the transition of her grandfather being in the past tense.

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This concept of pre-grieving was new to me, yet so clearly something I had gone through with the passing of my own mother. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – the motherfucker of all motherfuckers – during the spring of sophomore year of college.

My father and I were sitting in the McDonald’s in Cuba, N.Y., having just moved out of the dorm, when he informed me that she was in the hospital for surgery; a stomach resection, if I remember correctly. She spent much of May and June at St. Joseph’s in recovery and under observation before being discharged into hospice care. I visited daily, when I didn’t have to work, to keep her company and talk. It seemed like she just wanted to talk when she wasn’t resting.

I worked days at an auto parts warehouse, picking parts off the shelves, and nights as the closer at a gas station¹, so I would see her on the rare night off or weekend mornings before I went to work. Weekdays were spent resting, as the cancer ate away at her, as if she was saving her energy for the weekends when family would come over and my sister and I might be around more. I spent the summer watching her physically disappear and, I guess, pre-grieving.

Following her death, it’s not like I followed the traditional five steps of grief -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance -- as described by author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. My path was more like sadness, acceptance, Jack Daniels, compartmentalization, therapy. But, in the experience of being home, I guess I made my peace with it.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (stolen from the AP)

Pre-grieving, or anticipatory grief, is described in The Bible through the story of David in 2 Samuel:

Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.” Then Nathan went to his house. The Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child; David fasted, and went in and lay all night on the ground. The elders of his house stood beside him, urging him to rise from the ground; but he would not, nor did he eat food with them.

On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead; for they said, “While the child was still alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us; how then can we tell him the child is dead? He may do himself some harm.”

But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, he perceived that the child was dead; and David said to his servants, “Is the child dead?” They said, “He is dead.” Then David rose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the Lord, and worshiped; he then went to his own house; and when he asked, they set food before him and he ate.

Then his servants said to him, “What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you rose and ate food.” He said, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, ‘Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me, and the child may live.’ But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.”²

A wood-carved relief by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld depicting David's anticipatory grief over his son.

Now, I’m not one to regularly quote The Big Book, but there is a certain pragmatism to David when he tells his servants that the child is dead and there’s nothing he can do to bring him back. He grieved his son before death by weeping and fasting and that was that.

(In the next verse, 2 Samuel 12:24, David consoled his wife and proceeded to impregnate her.³ Now, that’s some kinky shit.)

The idea of preparing yourself for the passing of your loved one is seen as beneficial. It not only helps you get your mind in order about the present, but prepare for the future without that person around. A 2018 study conducted at Indiana University showed that those experiencing anticipatory grief had actually built a proactive coping mechanism. Rather than living with the fear and anxiety of what happens next, it’s making peace with what’s to come.

And for some, such as my daughter and me, the grieving of the loss isn’t all happening at one time.

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My wife offered to take our daughter to the skilled nursing facility where my father-in-law was living in the weeks before his passing. She passed on the opportunity without explanation. Maybe she had made peace with it in her own mind. Maybe she wanted her last memory of him as sitting in the oversized chair in our living room watching golf, not laying semi-conscious in a hospital bed.

Maybe she had already grieved her loss and was just waiting to say her final goodbye.

A Final Thought On Finality

Friends of mine know that I’m a big fan of writer and podcast host Dan LeBatard. On Tuesday morning, he took to his podcast to announce the death of his brother, the immensely talented artist David LeBatard (known popularly as LEBO). His words in sharing this news⁴ fit so well that I wanted to share it.

This is not comforting news that I’m about to share and I understand that my energy is down. I want to apologize to the audience for being out of here emotionally for the last year, the hardest year of my life that culminated with the hardest thing of my life at 2 a.m. this morning.

My little brother, my only sibling, my closest family member in a small family that is very close…and my best friend for 50 years passed away last night at 2 a.m. I don’t have a lot of experience with grief but I have been grieving him for a year because he was diagnosed more than a year ago…he’s been steadily deteriorating since and it’s been brutally, brutally hard to watch a poison eat him up from the inside and one of the biggest spirits I’ve ever seen consumed by illness.

I will say that Jason Isbell wrote one of the greatest love songs I’ve ever heard about vampires, oddly enough. One of the lyrics is, and forgive me if I botch this in the emotion of the this, but ‘what if time running out were a gift, I’ll work hard ‘til the end of my shift.’

And the hospitals and the sickness and basically I’ve worn one of those x-ray leaded vests for a year, just draped on me walking around with something I never imagined I would encounter. I was preparing for the death of my parents, so to have my father whisper to my brother last night, ‘we’ll see you soon,’ was a special kind of heartbreak because this is inconceivable. It’s something that I never considered possible, but what I will tell everyone listening here…when you put a clock on it…because you hear all the time, right, about these things changing people and changing life perspectives…when you put a clock on it and you value the moments you get because you don’t know how many you’re going to get in a way that is uncommonly present, what you get is the gift of gratitude that I have which is for the last year I have spent because it wasn’t a sudden, thudding finality of a car accident.

I’ve spent the last year saying all the things, getting a chance to appreciate him and say goodbye and ask for forgiveness for the family stuff and pour out my heart to him and I will tell you that there was grace and freedom at two o’clock in the morning as I’m watching the monitors show the numbers going down, to be in his ear, like physically mouth to his ear telling him that it was okay to go, that he was safe, that he didn’t have a reason to be scared and to see him stop suffering and to see him peaceful amid the horror of that was a seismic and great beauty that I will forever be grateful for.

1. See kids, back in my day, you’d work two or three jobs during the summer so you would have enough money for to afford books and cheap liquor in the fall and spring semesters.

2. 2 Samuel 12:14-23

3. Seriously, go look it up.

4. You can watch him say all of these words, but I’ll warn you that he gets emotional.