Anticipatory Grief

With dementia especially, the losses arrive in installments. They stop recognizing a name. They stop telling the story they always told. Each one is a small death that nobody holds a service for.

With terminal illness, you can find yourself living in two timelines at once, present for today while quietly rehearsing a future without them. That doubling is exhausting, and it is often mistaken for coldness.

It is not coldness. It is what love does when it is bracing.

The practical load is relentless. Medications, appointments, insurance calls, meals, transfers, the never-ending question of whether you are doing enough.

There is rarely space in that schedule for your own feelings, so they get postponed. Then they arrive at 2am, or as irritability at people who did nothing wrong, or as a body that keeps getting sick.

Therapy becomes one hour that is not about their care. We work on the grief, the resentment, the fear, and on what you actually need to stay standing.

At some point you may catch yourself hoping it will be over soon. Not for them, or not only for them. For you.

That thought terrifies people, and they almost never say it out loud. It is one of the most common things I hear in this work, and it does not mean what you are afraid it means.

You can love someone completely and be depleted by their illness. We make room for both without turning either one into evidence against you.