Months, not years.

On August 21, 2019, we learned that we were counting the rest of my dad’s life not in years, but in months. His cancer had metastasized to the point that there were no longer any curative treatments for him, but rather the doctors would begin palliative care and hospice. For the uninitiated, hospice means the patient has 6 or fewer months left to live. It could always be more, of course, but it could be less. I left the appointment with plans to make this Christmas the best ever, and trying to figure out how to get my brother home from Zurich for the month of December.

In my mind, this was round 2 of cancer for my dad, having a year before endured surgery and chemotherapy for the better part of 2018. He was declared cancer free in early 2019. But in reality, he’d already gone through a fight with cancer, 11 years earlier - melanoma. He. beat. melanoma. Literally a walking miracle. So in 2018, I didn’t feel particularly fatalistic - this go round of bowel cancer would be a blip, a crappy 2018, sure, but a blip in the bigger picture. Don’t get me wrong, I was scared, but in my mind, my dad was tough and could kick any cancer’s butt.

The ensuing afternoon and couple days after that meeting in the hospital, it sunk in that, given the aggressiveness of the cancer to date, we might not even get to Christmas. My grief was overwhelming, all consuming. And so in an attempt to work myself out of the numbness, in an attempt to control the situation, I headed to Amazon and began trying to order every book on grief, and more specifically, the grief you feel before the person you love passes. I found many about grief, but really only one book on anticipatory grief.

Which brings me to the “why” of this new blog - I want to share my journey as we progress to what my dad calls his “closing date” (a deal maker myself, I had to smile at that), to not only honor his life and this process, but to share my experience of this anticipatory grief, and where I can, share what resources I find helpful.

For anyone else out there experiencing the loss of, or future loss of someone they love, I hope you can either find something here that comforts you, helps you, or this is just a place you can go to know you aren’t alone.

Please stay tuned for more blog posts, or peruse the resources under the menu “GRIEF RESOURCES” at the top of this site.