How do you grieve someone who’s still alive?
The question sounds absurd, maybe even cruel. Like betrayal, like you’ve already dug a pit for burial while the body is still warm. And yet, I did it. Not intentionally, not ceremonially. But quietly, compulsively. While Mama was still here, still laughing in the dining table, still rubbing and massaging my back, shopping her green dress, as if time wasn’t running thin and I was already grieving her.
Psychologists call this anticipatory grief. A clinical term that sounds too neat for something so excruciating. It shows up in families facing terminal illness, dementia, aging parents. The textbooks say it’s grief that begins before loss, a kind of psychic rehearsal. It can or hopefully soften the shock later, they say. Sometimes it even helps people “cope better” when the final goodbye comes.
But I’m not sure I buy the tidy version. My own anticipatory grief wasn’t neat at all. It didn’t soften, it only get more pointy. It made every gesture glow too bright. The way Mama rubbed lotion into my hands. The way she answered every call with “Assalamualaikum, Kakak…” The way she laughed too loudly in the dining room. These weren’t just moments anymore, they became my own artefact-in-the-making.
It felt like I was underlining sentences in a book before the story was even finished. Like rehearsing a fire drill while the house was still standing. Like watching an hourglass, knowing you can’t flip it over, only stare as the sand thins.
So I keep asking myself:
Was I preparing wisely, or mourning too soon?
Was I honoring her, or betraying optimism?
Was I loving her harder, or giving up before I had to?
Both answers feel true.
Because anticipatory grief is contradiction. It’s noticing and losing at the same time. It’s gratitude sharpened into ache. It’s wanting to stretch time but also trying to get used to its collapse.
And maybe that’s why it hurt so much: it made me live in two realities at once. One where Mama was alive, reaching Candy Crush level six-thousand, laughing at her own stubborn brilliance. And one where she was already slipping away, her body writing the prologue to absence.
I documented obsessively. Notes, fragments, voice recordings in my head. I told myself it was to “remember,” but maybe it was also penance. To make up for the weekends I didn’t visit, the calls I postponed, the daughter I sometimes wasn’t. Writing became my field notes for love, and also my confession.
Here’s the irony, anticipatory grief didn’t make me despair. It made me pay attention. It was grief, yes, but also strangely present-tense love. I wanted to memorize everything before memory was all I had.
And yet sometimes I resent it. Why did I start grieving early? Why couldn’t I hold onto optimism longer? Why couldn’t I just sit with her without tallying the “lasts”? Did my premature mourning steal joy from her final months, or did it let me love her more deeply?
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.
And maybe that’s part of it, the science can only name it, but the living of it is something else entirely. Maybe anticipatory grief isn’t a diagnosis at all but a side effect of consciousness. When you know someone you love will leave, the mind splits. One half stays in the room. The other half is already peeking at the door, terrified of the knock that hasn’t come yet.
Maybe anticipatory grief is just the human condition turned inside out, the recognition that love is temporary, sharpened into daily consciousness. Maybe it’s love wearing mourning clothes, walking beside you before it needs to. Maybe it’s proof we knew how to pay attention.
So here I am, exactly four weeks after Mama’s passing, still analyzing my own grief. Wondering if the early ache prepared me or broke me more. Admitting that nothing feels fair, and love leaks out sideways, into jealousy, into rage, into silence.
If grief-after is a storm, then anticipatory grief is the strange, electric air before it. You smell the rain. You feel the pressure shift. You know it’s coming, and you start to shiver, not because you’re wet yet, but because you know you will be.
And maybe that’s what I was doing all along, shivering in advance. Holding love and loss at the same time, not because I wanted to, but because there was no other honest way to live.
And maybe this writing is also that, me shivering again, trying to map something unmappable. I don’t have a conclusion, only the debris of questions. I think it will take years before I understand what I was really doing in those hospital days, those kitchen days, those ordinary days that are no longer ordinary. Maybe I’ll never understand. Maybe anticipatory grief isn’t meant to be understood at all—only survived, like weather.
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