Comment on Nearing the end: How to deal with anticipatory grief for a terminally ill or elderly pet by Nancy.

I had never heard the term anticipatory grief until I joined your group. Thank you! I have gone through this multiple times in my life, both with pets and with people. Again, most recently with an elderly dog who had been diagnosed with CLL (leukemia) when he was 12 and at first we just did a watch and wait, then a a year of chemo which he did very well, and the last 6 or so months he started a slow decline with cognitive dysfunction. We were constantly adjusting – trying to keep him comfortable. He had to start wearing diapers and we had many nights of vocalization, pacing, getting stuck in a corner, etc. He still ate like a champ enjoying every morsel. At the same time I was watching my elderly mother go through a similar decline. Every visit with her, I would come home so sad. The decline happened at a slow pace that it’s sometimes hard to see and with Quinn the dog, I was constantly consulting the vet for meds or ideas of how to manage it, thinking that doing so he would get better…. He died in October, 2022 at 15.5 years old and my mom died in January 2023. In between, our 7 year old dog Fuji died rather suddenly of liver cancer. We virtually had no warning. As hard as the anticipatory grief was, his death hit me so much harder and it’s been harder for me to get through. I felt that with the anticipatory grief, since the grieving process started long before Quinn or my mom died, I was able to process and grieve those deaths better. But, the big thing about anticipatory death that I haven’t seen mentioned is that when you are dealing with anyone who has been sick for a long time before they die, when they do die, we tend to remember them for what they had become, not who they were before they were ill and I find that very hard. It takes me a long time to remember them in better days….