Grief is a powerful human response, the pain equivalent to the love we feel for those we lose. It is deeply personal, without hierarchy, presents differently in everyone, and helps us to heal in its own unique way. Bereavement support identifies several types of grief:
- Normal or uncomplicated grief
- Complicated grief
- Disenfranchised grief
- Collective grief
- Anticipatory grief
- Ambiguous grief
- Absent grief
- Secondary grief
- Cumulative grief
- Traumatic grief
The grief I wish to discuss is anticipatory grief, but not in the way we might typically expect it, or in relation to what is considered socially acceptable.
Anticipatory grief describes a range of emotional responses that occur prior to the loss of a loved one, where we are expecting the loss to occur. The anticipation may be due to our loved one having a terminal illness, or perhaps where someone is injured to a level where health care professionals tell us our loved one may not survive, and we should prepare ourselves for this. Anticipatory grief serves a purpose, as its presence indicates it has a role. Maybe our brain is preparing us for the secondary grief that comes when a loved one dies.
But anticipatory grief can also occur in situations which are far less talked about and far less accepted within our society. Maybe where a loved one has been substance misusing and their health has deteriorated to a level where we must prepare ourselves, or, as in my own case we live with an anticipatory grief that we will lose one or more of our loved ones to suicide.
When someone is bereaved by suicide, we commonly hear “there were no signs”, and suicide is often described as an ‘unexpected tragic loss’. But what if suicide is expected?
I am living with an unspoken and incomprehensible grief. I have three children, and all have expressed on several occasions that they do not want to be alive and wish to die. In each it presents in different ways, in one the entrapment that life will never get easier and they cannot cope with their day-to-day challenges, in the second that they will not live beyond the age of 16 and this is the age they plan to take their life, and in the third, an impulsive response when they cannot cope, expressing “kill me”. It is heartbreaking to hear, heartbreaking to know the despair they feel, and I live with a permanent fear that I will lose one or more of my children to suicide before I leave this world myself.
Part of me just wants to lock each of them in a room, keep them safe, and never let them out, but this too would be robbing them of a life, and is not realistic. It also makes their pain about me and managing my pain. Of course, I recognise that if any of them were at an immediate safety risk, that emergency services would be needed, and at the present time we are able to manage their safety and keep them safe from suicide as best we can, including where available, accessing support.
Instead, I live with the anticipatory grief and helplessness of a loss I do not want to contemplate but must. I contemplate it because I already know it will destroy me if the worst happens, so I know my brain is saying, lets start the preparations now. If you accept it now, it will be easier later. It is like a state of hopelessness where I am powerless to shape a safe outcome so instead have moved into a place of helpless acceptance.
The anticipatory grief and related emotions are preparing me so that acceptance will be easier, and so that it does not in fact destroy me, and so that I can survive. Nature is clever and is already preparing me for my own survival. I live desperately hoping that the only grief I will ever experience in relation to this is anticipatory, and nothing more.
I do not discuss my grief openly as I do not feel others will understand it. I do not want the universe to hear, in case it responds in any self-fulfilling way, and I write this anonymously in the hope that the universe does not self-fulfil by me writing it down, any more than if I was voicing it.
What I want is to highlight the complexity of both grief and suicide, and to write the unwritten and unspoken, so that any other parent who is experiencing this type of anticipatory grief knows they are not alone.