3. Let's Talk About: Loss (any type)

Naming my grief: Anticipatory Grief

Naming my core emotion: Anger

I didn’t know grief could begin long before death.

But when my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer over seven years ago, something inside me began to fracture. It wasn’t the sharp, immediate grief that comes after loss - it was a slow burn. The aching one that crept in quietly, like trying to boil water on low heat. I was already grieving the mother I knew, the grandmother my son would never grow up with, the potential years together that illness would soon silence.

This kind of grief has a name, anticipatory grief.

It’s the mourning that starts before goodbye, the sadness and the anxiety of watching someone you love disappear and breakdown in slow motion. Every medical appointment, every late-night worry, every moment just being in her presence was another layer of loss. I wasn’t just losing her future, I was losing ours.

As her illness deepened, so did my roles. I went from daughter to health advocate. From health advocate to caretaker. From advocate to the emotional anchor for my father, who was unraveling in his own way.

The truth is, my relationship with my father has always been strained. He has never been the kind of man who could meet others emotionally, least of all me. He wasn’t the husband my mother deserved and saying this out loud is already difficult, let alone the guilt I feel for having these thoughts in the first place. Watching her navigate her final years, full of grace, patience, loyalty and resilience - beside someone who often couldn’t offer her the same in return, left me quietly furious. I carried that anger alongside my love for her, and it became part of my grief long before she was gone.

When she passed, I thought there would be some release. Instead, life demanded more of me. Executor. Daughter. Sister. Wife. Mother. Every title came with its own expectations, its own weight. I was still the one holding everything together while everyone else got to move differently. My grief stayed buried under lists, logistics, and responsibilities…and they continue to do so. With the passing of my mother, I felt even more weight as the first born daughter to keep the “family” together.

And beneath it all, the anger simmered.

I am angry because life is not fair. Angry because the wrong parent died (I may go to some sort of hell for expressing this, if it even exists). I’ve whispered it before, but never said it out loud until now and even writing it fills me with guilt and shame. But it’s true. My mother was the heart of the family. She never asked for anything, never wanted us to worry. She was the quiet yet strong mom, the one who gave, who listened, who showed up in ways big and small. My father, though still alive, has always been absent in the ways that mattered most. And yet, as an adult and a parent now, I’ve come to realize that perhaps he showed his care for his children differently, through acts of service, in the ways he knew how.

It’s an awful thing to admit: that the parent who made you feel safe is gone, and the one who never knew how to be there remains. But that’s where I am. Angry that my mother’s light was taken far too soon. Angry that she never got to see her grandson grow. Angry that her love, which once grounded us all, now exists only in memory.

It’s been more than two years since her passing, yet I still find myself standing in the middle of that anger and unable to move forward, unable to let go. I think part of me has been waiting for permission to stop being strong. I continue to be stuck in “administration” purgatory (maybe self inflicted and this is going to have to be unraveled in another journal entry), that could be impeding my forward momentum.

For years, strength was how I survived: for her, for my father, for my family. But grief doesn’t respond to strength. It waits for softness. Lately, I’ve started to wonder if healing might mean allowing myself to be angry and still love her fiercely. To stop judging the messiness of my emotions, and instead honor them as part of the love I carry.

I miss her every day. Not just the mother I lost to cancer, but the woman who shaped me, loved me, and believed in me long before I believed in myself. Her absence is the quiet ache behind everything good I do. And while I may never fully make peace with losing her, I’m learning that maybe peace isn’t the point.

Maybe the point is to keep loving her through the anger. To keep carrying her forward. To let the grief breathe into all the cracks in my body and in doing so, finally, to let myself breathe too.