In my years on this planet, I learned that anticipation is imagining just how it's going to be - helping to carry us into the here and now when we really do have to cope - or we have to manage as my wise mother has been telling us of late. "We'll just manage," she says.
I've managed to avoid telling her that Donald Trump will be returned to the office he (so devastatingly poorly) managed in his previous four years. I managed through that long post-election night as I sat by her bedside, switching on my phone every half hour for news until it became clear the direction it was going. I felt smothered by that ominous darkness, the urgent voices through my headphones, and turned instead toward my mother, lying in a warm, comforting darkness, responding to my gentle touch on her forehead.
At 101 years old, my mother's likely been a Republican since she first registered to vote and she often referred to herself as a conservative - at least in the ways conservative used to be defined. After recent health setbacks, she has known her days here were going to be few and set her sights on helping to elect Kamala Harris - a woman - as President of our country. This from a woman whose own life - a good life - began just three years after women gained the right to vote in this country.
Since that dark election night, I've managed to separate out those emotions tied to this election - the fear, anger, outrage, bewilderment, the grief - from similar emotions as I anticipate my mother's passing into the warmth and love of the hereafter. I used a therapist's technique - sealed it all up in a box and put it in a safe place, locked so all that dark red swirl of darkness can't escape - for now. I anticipate that I won't be keeping it there forever.
I have always stayed away from the word ANTICIPATORY in my writing for it seems hard, cold, tacking o-r-y on the end of anticipate - a perfectly good word, an action word, a verb. For it is an action, not a descriptor.
Anticipatory grief. Today, with my mother on the brink of joining that great swirl of loved humans in the deep unknown, just plain grief will do.