Working With Anticipatory Grief

What Grief Teaches Us Before The Loss Arrives

Nothing in this world is permanent. It is perhaps the oldest aphorism humanity has ever uttered, scribbled on dried palm leaves or etched on stones since the very beginning. This one has survived civilisations, philosophies, and even science due to its raw inescapability.

Yet it is only irony that the same species which uncovered this truth, carried it through every era, and handed it faithfully to the next generation has never truly internalised it. And when grief arrives, most of us simply and massively fail.

Anticipatory grief..

Grief, I have learned, does not always wait for loss. And to grieve before the real loss is suffering in its most merciless form.

I grieved my fur best friend across seven months of chemotherapy, holding hope and sorrow in the same hands, watching him fall in and out of life of quality, while I stood by, helpless until one day he left.

Somewhere along three years of layoffs in tech industry, I find myself grieving in meetings and inboxes for a job not yet lost.

I now grieve the way my loved one with terminal illness calls my name, because I already know the shape of their absence. I am grieving someone who is still alive and that, I have learned, is its own kind of death

… And what I learned from it

Every setback has been, in its own reluctant way, a teacher.

The suffering from watching my dog through seven months of treatment carved patience into me, a patience I did not know I was capable of. It taught me selflessness, servitude, and how to recognise love in forms I was not aware of before.

The fear of layoff did something unexpected too, it loosened the grasp of my job and its hold on me. I still give my work the best I have, but I realised I am more than my job title. A Sanskrit diploma, Advaita Vedanta, this writing, they all came from the part of me that needed to remember who I was beyond my job.

But it is the grief I am living now that has changed me most profoundly. Every moment with the one I am losing feels weighted with meaning. I am more present, more deliberate, more willing to diminish my ego. To love without condition, to give without reserve. I see in them a calm that humbles me. I see an acceptance of fate that has quietly become gratitude for the life they were given. And in their smile, in the way they meet each moment without resistance and with beauty, I am learning to let go. To surrender.

Grief is real and I do not deny it but I am determined to observe it, to let it burn through what is unnecessary in me and leave something stronger behind.