By Wellness Editorial Team ยท October 20, 2025
“When the doctor told us six months, the first thing Dad said was: right then, we’d better get busy. He was laughing. We were all crying except him. That was so completely him.”
— Tom, 41 (name changed to protect privacy)
There is a particular kind of grief that arrives before loss does. It is called anticipatory grief, and it is, in Tom’s words, “the strangest thing I have ever lived through — stranger, in some ways, than the grief that came after.” You are mourning someone who is still here. You are holding their hand while simultaneously bracing for the moment you will not be able to any more. You are trying to be present and finding that the future keeps pulling at your sleeve.
Tom was thirty-eight when his father was diagnosed. His father was sixty-seven. The prognosis was six months, and for the first two weeks after hearing it, Tom describes feeling paralysed — unable to visit, unable to plan, unable to speak about it without feeling as though speaking would make it more real.
Then his father called him and said: are you coming over or not?
Tom’s father had always been, in his son’s telling, a practical man. Not unfeeling — “he cried at films, he cried at football matches, he cried when my daughter was born” — but someone who believed that the best response to a difficult situation was to decide what to do about it and then do it.
What he decided, in the weeks after his diagnosis, was that he wanted to use the time. Not in a grand or bucket-list way — “he wasn’t interested in skydiving,” Tom says, with a smile that comes through even over the phone — but in the ordinary, accumulated way that a life is actually lived. Sunday dinners. Long walks with the dog. Teaching Tom’s children how to play cards. Watching films he had always meant to see. Saying the things he had always meant to say.
“He made a list,” Tom tells us. “Not of places he wanted to visit. Of people he wanted to talk to properly. Of conversations he wanted to have. That list was the whole six months.”
What they did with the time
Tom is thoughtful when he talks about this, careful not to romanticise it. “It was horrible in ways I won’t ever fully be able to describe,” he says. “Watching someone get weaker. Managing your own panic. Trying to be cheerful when you don’t feel cheerful. Going home and falling apart in the car so the kids don’t see.”
But alongside all of that — and Tom is precise about the word alongside, not instead of — there was something that he can only describe as a gift. “We knew. We had the chance to do things deliberately that most people don’t get to do. My dad got to tell us he was proud of us. We got to tell him what he meant to us. Those things happened because we knew they needed to happen, and we made space for them.”
He thinks often about the people who don’t get that time. A sudden loss, an accident, a heart attack without warning. “I know how lucky we were, in a very specific and painful kind of way. Lucky is a strange word for it. But it’s the one that fits.”
Tom pauses for a long time before talking about the letters. His father wrote one to each of his children, his grandchildren, and his wife of forty years. They were left in a box on the kitchen table for the family to find.
“Mine said: you always worried too much about doing the right thing, and you nearly always did it anyway. That’s not a flaw. That’s who you are. I am so proud of who you are.”
He does not say anything for a moment after sharing this.
“I keep it in my desk drawer. I read it when I need to.”
We ask Tom what he would want someone to know who has just received a similar diagnosis for someone they love — who is standing at the beginning of the time, not knowing what to do with it.
“Don’t wait for a feeling of readiness that probably isn’t going to come,” he says. “Show up. Be there even when you don’t know what to say. Eat dinner together. Take photos. Ask them to tell you about things you don’t know yet — their childhood, their parents, the things they got wrong before they got them right.”
“The grief is coming regardless. It will arrive and it will be exactly as hard as you fear. But if you use the time, it arrives with something alongside it — a kind of fullness. A sense that you didn’t waste it. That matters more than I can say.”
Tom’s father died on a Tuesday morning in late autumn, with Tom and his mother beside him. It was, Tom says quietly, a peaceful death. “As peaceful as a death can be.”
Three years later, the Sunday dinners have continued. Not every week any more — life has a way of scattering people — but often enough that the habit is real. The bread recipe has been made so many times that Tom’s eldest can now make it alone. The four hours of recordings live on a hard drive and on a shared folder in the cloud, and Tom has listened to them more times than he can count.
“He’s still there in all of it,” Tom says. “In the bread. In the dinners. In the way I try to have the conversations I need to have instead of putting them off. He taught me that in the last six months of his life. Which is, I suppose, exactly the kind of thing he would have done.”
Navigating anticipatory grief
Anticipatory grief — grieving someone who is still here — is real, valid, and carries its own particular weight. If you are supporting a loved one through a terminal diagnosis, or carrying this kind of grief yourself, our counsellors are here. Get in touch — you don’t have to carry it alone.