Anticipatory Joy

For years I’ve been thinking and writing about and experiencing anticipatory grief. For 3 years, I knew my Dad would die of terminal cancer. There was no other ending. My mentors, terminal cancer, too. Both traveled the same path as my father at roughly the same time, their journeys faster, but the destination and much of the journey the same. Tender, important, and breathtakingly brutal and beautiful moments and days. Exhaustion, fear, desperation, time out of time, and finally, death. With all the caregiving and all the joy and grief and intensity of that time, they are gone now. All the weight of worry and wondering what would happen when and trying to plan for it so that I could be as present as possible to them and my grief and my family and my job and occasionally myself. All gone. Replaced by grief, as Margaret Renkle writes. The end of caregiving is grief. The thing I had been anticipating all along. 

And still, here I am, here we are, a year later. Last Mother’s Day was Janne’s memorial service. We dedicated her grandson at our home, with Janne’s composted body making its inaugural appearance in our garden just outside the dining room window. This weekend, we installed Oscar as the new senior minister at Unity Church - Unitarian, and it was a very good thing. I shared a message with the congregation there that came through loud and clear, after the tears the night before. Past to present to future, we are here now. The page has turned for Unity Church, and the page is turning for me, too. 

Our son is preparing to graduate from high school, our daughter is about to be promoted from middle school to high school. It will be 18 months after my Dad’s death and we will be on a plane as a family flying to Rome - to see Italy and France, two of his favorite places. I guess we’ll have to go to Greece next. 

Henry is about to choose which college he will go to. I am sanding the deck so we can stain it before his graduation party. He is imagining himself in Poughkeepsie or D.C., I am imagining visiting him in his new home and eating beans for the next 4 years. Something is moving. Something powerful and good. 

There is anticipatory grief here, a territory I find familiar. Anticipatory grief about how quiet the house will be and how much we will miss our son’s presence among us in the everyday way we get to have now. But this time there is anticipatory joy, too. Joy as I imagine these two amazing teens stepping over the thresholds before them. Joy as I imagine all of us celebrating with them. Grief as I imagine these milestones without the people who traveled so much of the distance with us, and sadness that I can’t tell them all about it in the ways I used to. There will be grief as we sit in a garden in Paris, baguette and cheese from the corner store before us, remembering my father who scrimped and saved to make that moment possible for the four of us, and there will be joy, too, as we toast him with unending appreciation and love.