The problem of pre-emptive grief

Back when I was still working towards an academic career, my research was beginning to look at particular sub-categories of grief. My postgraduate studies of the elegy, the genre of poetry which mourns a death, were getting refined to include new definitions of grief. This included, in the language of psychiatry, disenfranchised grief. Disenfranchised grief is an umbrella term which covers things like the loss of a pet, the loss of a secret lover, the loss caused by divorce, and many other instances in which the grief suffered might in some ways be seen as ‘taboo’. Or at least, less of an obvious loss than losing a loved person to death. Actually, the example that Freud uses in his work ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, upon which most of the literary theory about elegy has traditionally been based, is that of a jilted bride, which is clearly not a grief caused by death.

An area of disenfranchised grief that I had started to write about was that of anticipatory, or pre-emptive, grief. The grieving that occurs before a tangible, final loss has taken place. The example that I had been working on was the grief connected with dementia. This became more personal to me as I watched both sets of my grandparents, together with my parents, live through this pre-emptive grief; my Grandpa suffering from Alzheimer’s for the final years of his life, and my Grandad succumbing to vascular dementia.

I have been wanting to write poems about my own parents. However, I am finding it hard to begin. One big reason, currently, is that my Dad was recently diagnosed with cancer. It has since been treated with surgery and we await results from that. It turns out that pre-emptive grief is a real phenomenon. It is further nuanced for me because my Dad’s type of cancer is likely to be fully treatable. So there is much hope for recovery. But, there’s still a kind of grief.

From a writing point of view, this is quite hard to process. Any poem written now would feel like an elegy, which I feel reluctant to write. Yet, perhaps all poems about the people we love are elegies in some way – they memorialise that person whether they are still with us or not. Perhaps there is something slightly superstitious in not wanting to mourn for someone while they are still alive and (relatively) well. But then, we often regret that the nicest things said about people are usually at their funerals. Can I re-imagine this problem of writing pre-emptive grief, and consider it as a celebration of life and hope? Might the attempt to do this actually help to generate hope, in myself and others? I hope so.