Anticipatory Grief
The post I drafted a year before my mother's death, after she had her 2nd stroke
October 5, 2023
Exactly 14 months before her death
My mom just had a stroke a few weeks ago. I knew it the moment I saw her walk. She’d been sitting in the passenger seat of their car until we got down to my disability lawyer’s office. Since I moved to Arkansas in 2013, she has been my primary caregiver, the representative payee who helped me manage my SSI while I had daily seizures, and my best friend and primary playmate here.
In fact, she’s my first and longest-standing best friend.
We were two little peas in a pod all through my youngest years. Unfortunately, her string of misdiagnoses that finally settled on that classic 80s favorite: “chemical imbalance caused by Hysterical Female Syndrome” and the subsequent pharmaceutical guinea-pigging stole her crumbling vitality. (In truth, she had unaddressed trauma and flippin’ Chrons Disease.)
I was twelve when that all started. I was fourteen when the virtual loss of her dumped my guts out on the ground. See, she felt safe enough to let me witness when she collapsed into bed and couldn’t get up, but turns out she hid that from everybody else. I didn’t understand as a kid, and she didn’t know how to explain it to me, because nobody had any idea how to explain it to her.
So getting her back was one of the greatest joys and blessings of my life. The fact that it coincided with the repair of my lifelong Daddy Issues — with the man himself — has been nothing short of miraculous.
We’re three peas in the pod now.
So when Mom hauled herself out of that car…when I finally got a look at her face…when I heard her sluggishly speak about her symptoms without the road noise and radio to mask her slurring…and especially when I saw her shuffle down the sidewalk, holding onto my father’s arm…
I knew.
That’s a left-side stroke.
Not bad enough that half her face is melted down her skull. But it droops a little now. She has to swing the right foot out to the side to keep it from dragging. It’s the right ear that can’t clear itself. It’s her right hand that can’t write, and Mrs. Lightning Typer Extraordinaire has become a hunt-n-pecker. She can barely even text.
So many of the symptoms she’s experiencing are ones I’ve lived with on and off — sometimes simply ON — for over two decades.1
Now as I try to dance or write about the pain I feel in seeing her laid so low, and the blast crater that the loss of her has blown into my life all over again, I wind up bawling my eyes out instead. It hits me as though I’ve lost her already.
I hear this is called Anticipatory Grief. 2
It’s like looking at her across the room and hearing the Jaws Theme in the back of my mind. I am four years old again, lost in the department store and I can’t find my Mommy. I am fourteen again, standing over that bed and wishing-wishing-begging that she would get up. I stand in my living room and get slammed in the ribcage with how it will feel to know that she is not currently sitting in hers—will never sit in hers again.
Because it’s coming.
I have recently passed the 50-year-old line of demarcation. My dad lost his dad when he was fifty. My mom, who is exactly one week younger than he is, had lost hers just a couple years before that. She lost her mom and a sister to stroke.
That’s what gets all the women of my maternal line.
It’s the heart-attacks and cancer that does in my paternal line. Except my dad’s mom. She was indestructible until her mid-90s. I honestly don’t think I wanna live that long. Not with all the health issues I’ve battled since I was twenty-eight, when I got hurled down into into Dain-BramageLand.
Now my mom is down here with me.
It visibly aged my father in under two weeks. Poor guy has been thrown into the deep end, not merely in becoming her primary caregiver. Now he is also glub-glubbing in the deep end of disability rights, government agencies, and brain trauma that are the staples of my life. It’s a steep learning curve, but he’s a champ and we’re the Peas.
Even so.
IT STARTS.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
AND A NEW BEGINNING.
#Don’tWanna
As I turn the corner toward my second half-century of life, I find it fitting that it marks the beginning of this particular ending. Thus, I am in deep, deep mourning even though she is right here with me…and yet…she is not.
UPDATED EDIT: Now that she has passed, I’m obviously in full-blown mourning.
One of her favorite artists:
Music is instrumental (badum-tsss…didn’t even try for that one) in my healing from grief. The first thing I instinctually do when any emotion is too overwhelming for me to easily decipher in my conscious mind: I make a playlist about it.3
Sometimes I move to that music. Sometimes I sing along. Sometimes I just listen to it obsessively. This is the playlist I made after returning home from that trip to the lawyer’s office. I needed to dance and cry and dance and lie on the floor in the faerie lights and thrash out my emotions and cry some more.
If this one helps you too, here it is:
As for the rest of what I do when I am struck by grief, that will take a whole other publication. I’ve gotten into it over on Tinkerings of an Elemental Alchemist.4
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT:
Burnout: (un)Comfortably Numb
For the past two-and-a-half months, I’ve had…ahem…just a few things come down the pipe. My seizures have come back. My eyeball is twitching. I’m pretty sure my hair is starting to do another mass-dump. And finally…burnout.
© 2025 Hartebeast
The entire gamut of my writing about Brain Injury:
At times like this, I turn to the tools in my 5 Elements System. Heck, this kind of stuff is the very reason why I created it beyond a dance metaphor.
I had actually drafted this tale as a lead-in to a post on Tinkerings about the intersection of Elemental Fire (emotion, passion & heart) and Elemental Water (story, meditation & mind). One of the places where these elements meet and mingle is what I’m going through right now. Each element has its primary emotions we work through.
The Water Element’s primary emotions are Joy & Grief. Its bodily realms are the nervous system, sweat glands, and of course…tears. One of its energetic components is Flow. And oh, have they been flowing.
Right now I need these tools even more than I did after Mom’s stroke. They are by no means the toolkit of any sort of professional grief councilor or mental health practitioner or anything else like that. Neither are they advice on what you should do about YOUR grief. They are just the map of what I do to ease my own. If it’s useful to anybody else, that will make me extra happy.
And in particular right now:
This was touching, Alexx.
I’m so sorry for your loss. And I’m sorry that your experience of grief started before your mum had even passed on.
I remember hearing someone talk about the loss of their father once. They said it was a long slow passing and beyond the grief and mourning, there was also a sense of relief that their dad was no longer suffering.
I don’t say that because I suspect it’s your experience — I just think the whole experience of losing a loved is so complex.
Sending you best wishes :)
Thank you for sharing this. 🥰