Anticipatory Grief - Hell on Earth
You’re probably asking yourself, what the heck is “anticipatory” grief?
You’re reading the wrong article if this instantly doesn’t resonate with you. Then again, the very nature of anticipating grief is something most of us push down into the very bottom of our conscious minds.
This is going to get very real, so let’s put the triggering warning right upfront. We’re going to be talking about the death of someone we love driven by an overdose of the street poisoned drug supply. I have no desire to cause additional fear or pain, so I urge you to stop reading right now if this is causing that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
If you’ve been dealing with substance use disorder with someone you love, even for a short period, your mind has probably gone to that dark place. It’s impossible not to. Every place we turn, we hear or read about another overdose death. It’s called (the other pandemic) for a reason!
The numbers just don’t stop! Every month, our province announces the number of deaths like it is some sort of lottery that the misfortunate have won. I use to believe we’ll run out of people with substance addiction, and then the horror will stop. How naïve I was – but no more. Now my wife and I often think about when it will be our turn? When will (he) be on the list? What will it be like when the police come to our door or call us?
Morbid? You’re damn right it is! We can’t stop though. The thoughts are always there, just under the surface and often they bubble up into the conscious mind. That’s when it gets so real that you can feel the heat of anxiety rush over your body. Your mouth dries up, Your hand's sweat and your heart races.
By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have experienced the grief of the death of someones we deeply care about. Can we ever say that some deaths are just regular or normal? Like a grandparent from old age?
Possibly many of us even normalize sudden deaths from a car accident or an industrial accident. These events are unplanned, yet we all expect the possibility these events can happen. However, most of us don’t dwell on the unlikely hood that these can happen to people we love. We live our lives in the hope that it happens to others, but not us.
The potential death of someone we love who dies from an overdose is an entirely different thing. When you realize that a person you love has substance use disorder and is using street poisoned drugs, it doesn’t take long to also realize they now walk shoulder to shoulder with the Grim Reaper. I’m talking about a personal relationship. One in which with every dose they take, the Grim Reaper rolls the dice with them of life and death. The odds are slightly better than Russian Roulette, but not by much.
Visualize your worst fears. You control them by locking them up in a box. Could be spiders, snakes, closed spaces or fear of heights. Somehow the box opens. The lids begin to tremble, and then all those horrid things begin to spill out over the sides of the box you’ve used to keep those fears in check. You climb up onto the lid and start jumping up and down to smash those filthy revolting creatures and fears back into the box. That’s what anticipatory grief is like. Those thoughts and feelings grab your heart and squeeze until you can’t breathe. It happens all the time. You can’t seem to control them.
To use another analogy, anticipatory grief is like taking a hammer and being forced to hit your thumb with it. There is no choice or chance that you can get out of it. You will hit your thumb. The only variable is when. You feel the hammer in your hand, its weight. The steel is hard and unforgiving, the handle gives lots of leverage to your swing. Looking down, you can see the thumb of your other hand on a large block. There is no give beneath your hand. This won’t just damage your thumb – it will destroy it and you know this to the bottom of your soul. Minutes tick away. Time is running out. The end is inevitable.
Anticipatory grief is living in that moment just before the hammer drops. Sometimes it washes over you many times during the day. Mostly you live with it week in and week out, a constant reminder of what is likely to happen. Most parents, grandparents or family never resolve the anxiety storm inside them. How can we? When you love someone you know who is walking with the Grim Reaper, and there is nothing you can do, worry is all that is left for us.
There are only three resolutions to this hell on earth. They begin the healing journey and stop using drugs. We disconnect from them, which frankly is just fooling ourselves into thinking we don’t care anymore or with the damnation of that hammer when it actually falls – their death occurs from an overdose.
My wife and I have often talked through all of this. We’ve even reached that stage where we’ve both voiced that we’ve accepted the inevitable, that we’re at peace with it and that we should move on in our lives. That, of course, is a crock of excrement. However, it does provide a way of fooling your brain, so I’m not going to knock it too much. You can call it cognitive thinking strategies or changing your thinking so you don’t go completely insane. I say to you, whatever works is what you have to do.
This leads me to talk about guilt. Guilt is woven all through this mess. Guilt around what you’ve done that might have contributed to the substance disorder of your family member in the first place. Guilt on choices to support them or not support them. Do I enable their behaviour? Do I not help enough? Or the biggest guilt trip of all! Sometimes I wish it would just happen. Then it would all be over and instead of anticipatory grief, I could move on to (real) grief. At least then, there would be an end to the suffering. However, during more lucid moments, I understand that a choice like that just completely opens the horror box. Today I choose to continue to jump up and down to keep the lid close.
Well if you’ve stuck with me so far, you’re probably thinking that this is a horrible place to be. You’re probably waiting for the good news. Strategies that you can use to help you or your spouse through all of this while you wait for your family member to stop using substances.
Usually, when I write about substance use disorder articles, I like to give some sort of positive message in all the hurt and pain. I wish there was a one-stop panacea for all of this anticipatory grief stuff. However, my wife and I have not found it yet and we’ve been at it going on almost two decades. I’d be doing you a great disservice and harm if I blabbed on about how you can choose happiness or your can choose your thinking. That would be like telling you that if you can’t, it must be a failure on your part. That’s not true. Most of us just stumble through life day-to-day. Certainly, there are ups when you think you’ve accepted the situation, then you’ll drop back into the feeling just before the hammer begins to fall. These ups and downs are a fundamental piece of living with someone who has substance use disorder.
I have a great friend, Ben. We often proofread each other's writings. He’s also a retired counsellor and has tons of experience over a very long career. When he read the first draft of this article, he fired back a reply and told me, “Wow! You didn’t hold anything back. That was an intense read!”. Subconsciously I think that was my intention. To make it as real as possible. In my mind, it had to be that way, otherwise, readers who are experiencing anticipatory grief would question their thoughts and feelings as being more intense than the majority of people.
Ben also pointed out that we walk a fine line between being too brutally honest versus offering no hope. I value his opinion because I’ve found out throughout our friendship that he’s almost always right.
He also provided great input on strategies we all can use. I agree with every last one of these. Both my wife and I have used all of them and continue to do so. So in the interest of leaving you all with hope, which after all is what we all need desperately, here are some very useful strategies that can help you navigate through anticipatory grief.
We can hold hope for the best but don’t expect anything. Use what you know and continue to learn more. Take control of yourself, when you catch yourself wallowing. All of us will fluctuate between the highs and lows. Don’t stay in the valleys. Then there’s the idea of radical acceptance — anticipatory grief exists alongside hope. You can experience both ends of these feelings simultaneously. Hope can exist alongside sorrow, hope can exist alongside fear and anger. Don’t lose hope when the others have you in their grip. Hope can exist without expectations and alongside the feared outcome of might be.
Finally, I will leave you with this. Most of us are stronger than we think. We are capable of living in the moment. That is where those of us need to be who exists with anticipatory grief. Living moment to moment. A great man once said, “if you must travel through Hell, keep going.”
Ron Merk
(Ron is a person with lived experience. He advocates for families and people with mental health and substance use disorders.)