Willow Reed

The WordsOther Thresholds

Other Thresholds 11 min read

Anticipatory grief: when you grieve a parent who is still here

An old wristwatch and a pair of reading glasses set down together on oat linen, a terracotta cup of tea gone cold beside them, the empty chair beyond falling out of focus

Anticipatory grief is grief that starts before the loss. If it arrived while you were becoming a mother, it is not two problems. It is the same threshold twice.

Anticipatory grief is grief that starts before the loss. You are mourning someone who is still here, still on the end of the phone, still asking how the baby slept, and the mourning is not premature and it is not disloyal. It is a response to something that has already started.

Let me say where I am standing first. My mother is alive and two hours away, so what I have is only the near end of this, the part where you notice for the first time that she is finite. What I know past that, I know because women write to me from further in.

The reason it sits on this site at all is that it is the same shape as the thing this site is about. Matrescence is grief for a woman who has not gone anywhere. This is grief for a mother who has not gone anywhere. Two thresholds, one mechanism, and no usable language for either. I write about the first in Losing Yourself; this piece belongs to Other Thresholds, where the rest of the unnamed passages go.

What the word covers, and what it leaves out

The term belongs to a clinical literature and I am borrowing it rather than applying it to you. Clinicians define it. What I can do is say what it is like from inside, which a definition does not carry.

It has never meant one settled thing. A 2020 paper in the International Journal of Palliative Nursing sets the original sense against the one that replaced it. Its authors, Emilie Allard, Christine Genest and Alain Legault, describe Erich Lindemann in 1944 as treating anticipatory grief simply as something that happens under an expected death. The framing that reached hospice practice recasts it as something that works, that does useful advance labor toward the mourning still to come.

That drift, from inevitable to useful, is what nearly everything now written about this rests on, and it is the one I am going to refuse.

The usage you will actually meet is the hospice one: a diagnosis, a timeline somebody has estimated, grief for a death that is coming. It is a real question, competently answered in a hundred places, and it is not the only one.

Much of what women describe to me is not that. Nobody has been given six months. There is a diagnosis with a long slow arc, or none at all and only the evidence accumulating that a person is changing. The second time she asks the same question in an afternoon.

What you are grieving there is not her death. It is her, as she was, and she is across the table while you do it.

If you are reading this somewhere in your own first years of being a mother, that is the second time in a short while you have been asked to mourn somebody who has not gone anywhere. Nobody names either one, and nobody at all names them together.

Why it arrived the same year the baby did

Across 2023 and 2024 an average of 7.6 million people providing unpaid eldercare also had a child living at home, and a third of them had a child under six (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). The two jobs land together often enough to be counted, and they do not queue politely. It is not hard to see why: American mothers averaged 27.5 years old at a first birth in 2023, up from 26.6 in 2016 (National Center for Health Statistics, 2025), and later first babies leave less room between the two.

But arithmetic is not why it lands. It lands because a baby moves you up a rung and you feel the ladder move under you. There was a row above you whose job was to be the people who know what to do, and you could be forty and still have one. Now you are the person somebody else needs, and you look up on the same day and see that the row has thinned.

I noticed it at a particular moment I have never quite got over. My mother was holding my son and I was watching her hold him and I was working out, without having decided to, how many years she would get with him. He was eleven days old. Nothing was wrong with her. I have never told her I did that.

It is the same grief you are already carrying

If you have been reading here a while you have met this shape already, in the self you grieve when you become a mother. The difficulty there is that the woman you have lost is not dead, is not anywhere else, and is standing in your kitchen, so none of the machinery that surrounds an ordinary loss ever switches on. No date, no gathering, no permission.

This is that, aimed at somebody else. There is no moment your mother went, only a slow substitution across years that nobody marks, including her.

So if both are running at once you are not carrying two problems. You are carrying one mechanism twice. Two unnamed griefs feel like evidence that something is specifically wrong with you. One named pattern, arriving twice, does not.

I went looking for research on this exact pair and could not find any. Searching Europe PMC on September 14, 2026, matrescence returns 99 papers, and reading the titles and abstracts, not one is about a new mother grieving her own parent. The two are studied in separate rooms: matrescence work is about the mother and her infant, anticipatory grief work is about caregivers of the dying, whose age profile puts new mothers outside the sample almost by construction. That is one database and plenty is written outside it, but the obvious place to look does not have this.

The thing you get promised, which does not happen

The tidy version says grief spent in advance is grief you will not spend later. It suggests the exhausting years are buying something, and a woman in the middle of them badly wants that to be true. You are especially open to it if you have just had a baby, because the newborn year is the other thing everyone tells you to endure now on the promise of a return later.

In 2016 a team led by Mette Kjaergaard Nielsen published a systematic review in Clinical Psychology Review, gathering twenty-five years of studies of caregivers before and after a death. The assumption that grieving beforehand would ease the bereavement was not confirmed. Caregivers carrying high levels of grief before the death tended to have harder bereavements, not easier ones.

One distinction inside that review matters more than its headline. It separates two things ordinary language treats as one, and they pointed opposite ways. Being prepared, meaning you know what is coming and have faced it, went with doing better afterwards. Grieving in advance, meaning you are carrying the loss now, went with doing worse.

I want to be careful with that, because it is the sort of sentence that can cost somebody a year. Those studies followed people caring for someone who was dying, which is not where most of the women reading this are standing, so the finding travels to the long slow arc by argument rather than by evidence. And they are patterns across observational studies, not proof of cause: grief beforehand may mark out the people who were going to struggle rather than be the reason they did. What it does not support is the banking model, and the banking model is what gets handed to you. If you are carrying the present thing partly because you believe it is a deposit against a future one, that belief is doing work it may not be able to do.

What it actually does to who you are

This is the part that belongs on a matrescence site rather than a caregiving one, because the damage it does is not to your week. It is that you lose the person you take things to, while she is still there to take things to.

She is where the hard thing has always gone. Now she is the hard thing, so it cannot go there, and you manage the conversation instead of having it. You ask about her week. You keep your own week light. Anybody watching would say you are close, and you are, and something has been quietly removed from it that you cannot name at the dinner table.

And you start rehearsing. In the car, mostly. You run the phone call, work out who you would ring first, and then you are appalled at yourself for having been almost comfortable in there. What I think, reasoning rather than reporting, is that it is the mind approaching something unsurvivable-looking from a safe distance, repeatedly, and that it is not a wish. Hold that loosely. It is the one place here where I am guessing at the inside of your head rather than mine.

Underneath all of it is the identity part. You were a daughter. That was a fixed thing, older than any other role you have, and it is quietly reversing while you are still weeks or months into being somebody's mother. Aurélie Athan calls matrescence a lifespan developmental transformation rather than a postpartum episode (Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2024). Both of your positions in the family moved in the same season. No wonder you cannot locate yourself.

Where this stops being mine to talk about

Grief and illness are not the same thing, and which one you have is not something a page can settle for you.

If nothing shifts at all, if you cannot function, if you have stopped being able to feel anything in either direction, or if your own thoughts frighten you, that belongs with a doctor, a midwife or a psychologist, this week rather than after it. Caring for a parent and a newborn in the same year is a real load and it is not a character test.

I have written separately about what one woman's account can and cannot do for you. Being described accurately is not the same as being assessed, and this piece is only the first of those.

What I still do not know

Whether naming it helps here the way naming matrescence helps. There the word does real work, because the thing is invisible and the word makes it visible. Here it is not invisible at all. Everybody can see that your mother is aging, and I do not know what a name gives you when the problem was never that nobody could see it.

And whether I am writing this early because it is useful to somebody, or because rehearsing is what I said it was two sections ago and this is a more respectable format for it. Both are probably true. I would rather say so than let a measured tone imply I have settled it.

What to carry

You are allowed to be grieving somebody who is in the next room. It does not mean you have given up on her, it does not mean you are wishing it forward, and it does not have to wait for a diagnosis to count.

And if it turned up the same year you became a mother, that is not two pieces of bad luck landing together. It is one threshold showing up twice, in the same family, at the age when it tends to.

Nobody is going to hand you a word for this one. The women who write to me mostly want one thing confirmed, which is that they are not doing it wrong. You are not.

Sources

Keep reading in Other Thresholds.

Willow Reed writes about matrescence and maternal identity. About Willow. Willow Reed is a pen name. The experience is not.