Grieving Someone Who’s Still Here

For a decade and a half, I’d been folded into a close-knit family of in-laws. We gathered for family meals nearly every month, for a birthday, a holiday, or just because. At the center of it was my mother-in-law, Geneva. She was the hub of the family wheel. Everything and everyone turned around her.

We all saw the changes. Subtle at first, her once-sharp decisions began to seem poorly thought out. Things fell through life’s cracks. When she fell asleep in a grocery store parking lot, it was her blood sugar. When she forgot something important, she hadn’t slept well or maybe she hadn’t heard us. Every worrisome moment came with an explanation.

Then came the visit to our home, one of her last. Geneva seemed like herself. Until she walked up to my husband and me and asked where the bathroom was.

Darrell’s lips parted in surprise. My heart, and my answer to her question, skipped a beat. Then I smiled and pointed down the hall, to the same bathroom she’d used off and on for more than thirty years.

At the time, I was on the pastoral staff at the First Christian Church and also worked as a caregiver in an adult foster home, providing hospice and palliative care. I knew what her question meant. After everyone went home, my husband and I talked late into the night. But I’d already seen it in his face. He knew too.

We had been watching it happen for years. We just hadn’t wanted to believe it. One simple question, one she never should have needed to ask, ripped away every excuse we had left.

And our world shifted on its axis, devastating our family. She died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2009.

What Is Anticipatory Grief?

Our first pains of loss that day were magnified through the months and years that followed. What we felt wasn’t unique. Most of us have grieved a loss before it arrived. Life is full of transitions that leave us missing what was, even when we’re excited about what will be, like an unplanned career change or a child leaving home. Anticipatory grief is the pain we feel as we prepare for a loss. With Alzheimer’s, it means grieving someone who is still physically present while the essence of who they are is slipping away. It often arrives long before any diagnosis, while we’re still telling ourselves it’s nothing.

Feeling it doesn’t mean we’ve given up on the person we love. Love grieves, and it starts grieving the moment it understands what it’s losing.

Years later, when I wrote One Last Summer, I gave that kind of moment to Jim. He comes home from the feed store, holding a past-due bill, embarrassed and irritated. His wife, Ruth, has always kept their books without a problem. Sitting at her desk, he spots the store’s logo in the wastebasket and starts digging. He finds months of unopened mail.

“The shock, embarrassment, and irritation from earlier in the morning melted away, replaced by a nauseating dread.”

Jim doesn’t have words for it yet. Neither did we. But that dread is where the grieving begins.

Jesus Wept

There’s a similar moment in the Gospel of John that brings me a lot of comfort. When Jesus arrived in Bethany, his friend Lazarus had been dead four days. Mary and Martha were grieving, and so were their friends. Even though Jesus knew he was about to call Lazarus out of the tomb, he stood with them all and cried anyway.

“Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’” John 11:35–36

Despite knowing how the day would end, Jesus still wept. His tears reveal the significance of the moment. He grieved because he loved, and the loss deserved to be acknowledged.

The people standing nearby saw his tears and understood something about him. See how he loved him. His grief became a witness.

When Grief Becomes a Witness

Ours can too. Grief changes us. It softens hard places in us and teaches us what matters. God doesn’t waste that change. The people walking beside us, and even those just watching from a distance, are learning from how we grieve. When we let ourselves mourn while still holding onto God, we show them that faith and tears can live in the same heart.

Broken and Still Beautiful

In One Last Summer, Ruth buys a delicate bone china teacup painted with tiny strawberries and vines. By the end of that day, it’s broken, a large piece missing from the front. When her friend sighs that it was so beautiful, Ruth answers:

“It still is. In its own way.”

Ruth and her beautiful, broken teacup illustrate the same truth those of us who love someone with Alzheimer’s live with. Something is broken. Something is gone. And still, the beauty remains, if we have eyes to see it.

Grieving someone who is still here is one of the hardest kinds of love. We don’t have to hide it or rush through it. Jesus didn’t. We can let ourselves weep and trust that God is near, to the ones we love and to us.

Lazarus’s life didn’t end at the tomb, and neither will ours.

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I wrote One Last Summer for those walking this road and for the people who love them. If a copy would encourage someone you know, find it on Amazon.

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