Anticipating Loss, Imagining Grief
Using Futures Literacy to Explore Anticipatory Grief
My father celebrated his 88th birthday recently and I find myself thinking about his mortality more and more these days. As a Black man born and raised in Baltimore in the 1930s, I realize how many odds he beat and how fortunate I am to still have him today. Yet, the fear of his absence weighs heavily on me.
Recently, I accompanied him back to his hometown for the funeral of his last remaining childhood friend. During the service, he mentioned how they had a bet that whoever died first owed the other one $100. It was a joke that carried a lot of pain in it. After the service, we visited the place where they first met as children and performed a grief ritual to offer some closure. Seeing my dad wrestle with grief and his own mortality has deeply impacted me and brought his mortality more clearly into my view.
What I'm describing is my experience with anticipatory grief.
Anticipatory grief is the grief we feel before a loss occurs. It's everything we feel when we're facing a loss and cannot help but anticipate the pain, sorrow, anger, and life changes that may come with it.
The anticipation of his loss troubles me. But as someone who studies the future, I have a slightly different relationship to anticipation. In futures studies, anticipation is the only example of the future that we have in the present. You can't point to an example of the future. There are no tangible signs of it. All we have is our anticipation of it.
But there are multiple ways we can anticipate the future.
Futures Literacy, which I introduced in my last article, is defined by UNESCO as the ability to "imagine multiple futures, understand the role of anticipation, and use the future to innovate the present." It's a skill that teaches us how to use anticipation to create new knowledge in the present.
It got me wondering: can we use Futures Literacy to explore how we might anticipate loss differently, and how might that shape our experience of grief?
Let's begin by defining anticipation a little more.
There are two primary modes of anticipation we engage in:
anticipation for the future
anticipation for emergence
I like to think about them as seeing with two different eyes.
Anticipation for the future is the "eye of prediction." This is the lens through which we make predictions, plan, and look for the outcomes that seem most likely or most favorable. We see the future from where we are now and what we know today. This eye is limited by what we believe about the future and what we think is possible. Even the dreams we see from this eye are constrained by our present assumptions and the paths we can currently imagine. We envision both probable and desirable futures from this eye.
Anticipation for emergence is the "eye of imagination." This is where we foster creativity and improvisation. Here we ask what might be possible beyond what we currently know. What could we become? With this eye, uncertainty becomes a resource. We learn what the future has to teach us about the present and how to adapt to unforeseen challenges. The futures here are not probable or necessarily desirable. They are disassociated from the present. What's most important is that we are no longer assuming tomorrow must resemble today.
Now let's apply this to my grief scenario by starting with the probable and desirable futures.
What I most fear about my father's death is having to live without his presence. I fear not having him to call for advice or as a source of support when life feels overwhelming. I fear not having him around to share moments of joy and pride. Ultimately, I fear having to live life without him.
I imagine the pain of this loss will be unbearable. I imagine the depth of my grief might force me into isolation and retreat. This is the probable future I foresee. A result of the eye of prediction.
The most desirable outcome is that I don't incur the loss at all, but as Francis Weller reminds us, "everything we love, we lose." Understanding that the loss is inevitable, the question becomes: what is my most desirable experience of grief?
I'd like to be held and supported by family and friends. I'd like my family to come together regularly to remember and celebrate his life and support each other through the loss. I'd like us to create a collection of videos, pictures, stories, advice, and memories for us to lean on when his absence weighs heavily on any one of us. I'd like us to participate in grief rituals together and build strong communication channels so that no one feels isolated or alone.
This desirable future is also a result of the eye of prediction. In both cases, I am extrapolating from what I know and projecting my understanding of the present onto the future.
As I reflected on these futures, I began to realize that what I was anticipating wasn't just my father's death. I was also anticipating how society would expect me to respond to it.
As we transition into the eye of imagination, we begin by unearthing the assumptions hidden within our previous futures. This eye requires that we no longer assume tomorrow resembles today.
Several assumptions reveal themselves. I'm assuming that I'll no longer have access to my father's advice, though perhaps it lives on in me and in others. I'm assuming that family must be the primary source of care and remembrance. What if strangers, community networks, or even technology fulfilled some of those roles? I'm assuming that grief is something I must carry myself.
That last assumption is the one I want to explore.
What if we lived in a society where you weren't expected to bear your grief? What if instead you were expected to completely fall apart?
In this future, you wholly surrender to your grief, supported by social institutions and those around you. When you experience loss, you name it and then take as much time as you need within it. Society provides the resources and support necessary to put yourself back together when you are ready, but there is no timetable other than what your body sets.
For major losses, people might spend years in the depths of grief, emerging only once they've excavated all the broken pieces of themselves. Throughout this process they are held and supported, and their experience is treated as a natural rhythm of life.
Perhaps workplaces are designed with grief sabbaticals built into them. Perhaps communities maintain circles of care that automatically activate after major losses. Perhaps grief houses exist alongside schools, libraries, and hospitals as part of the public infrastructure. Structures are in place to prevent grief from turning into abandonment or despair, but people are given permission to grieve openly and honestly.
The process is understood as contributing to the health and well-being of society rather than detracting from it.
How might anticipatory grief be experienced in this world?
I imagine we would no longer carry the fear of having to "hold it all together" through extreme emotional distress. To return to my personal example, would I fear life after the loss of my father in the same way if I weren't expected to immediately resume living it? Not that the loss would hurt any less, but that my anticipation of the loss, the grief I'm experiencing now, would be shaped differently by my expectations of what comes after.
When we zoom out, even more questions emerge.
What institutions would have to exist for this future to be possible? What economic systems support it?
Who performs the care work?
How do they prevent surrender from becoming abandonment?
How are people who do not collapse viewed?
What cultural values make this world possible?
In a Futures Literacy Lab, we would spend time building this world and exploring these questions. The answers would not tell us what the future will be. They would help us see the assumptions embedded in the present.
Perhaps that is the most valuable insight. Futures Literacy helped me realize that anticipatory grief is not only shaped by the loss we expect, but also by the social conditions in which we expect to grieve.
This raises an important question about the present: Are we trying too hard to hold ourselves together? Who does the performance of resilience actually serve?
Of course there are times when grief becomes overwhelming and people need support. But I wonder whether we spend far less time asking the opposite question: what happens when our obligations overwhelm our grief?
Grief is a natural process that our society often struggles to make space for. Work continues. Bills still arrive. Responsibilities remain. Many of us are expected to carry profound loss while maintaining the appearance of normalcy. What are the consequences of repeatedly interrupting grief in order to keep functioning?
I began this reflection thinking about my father's mortality. I expected Futures Literacy would help me think differently about the future loss I fear. Instead, it helped me think differently about the present.
The exercise did not make me less afraid of losing my father. It did not remove the sadness, uncertainty, or love that sit beneath my anticipatory grief. What it revealed is that some of what I fear may not be the loss itself, but the conditions under which I imagine I will have to grieve.
Perhaps anticipatory grief is not only about the future we expect to lose. Maybe it is also about the future we expect to inherit after the loss occurs. A future where we are expected to be resilient, productive, and composed. A future where grief is squeezed into whatever time remains after work, obligations, and daily life.
Futures Literacy invites us to imagine otherwise.
Not because those imagined worlds will come to pass, but because they reveal assumptions hidden inside our own. By imagining a society that treats grief as a natural and necessary rhythm of life, I began to see how unusual some of our current expectations might be.
My father will die one day. That reality has not changed. What has changed is the question I am carrying.
Instead of asking only how I will survive that loss, I find myself wondering what kind of world would better support all of us in living through it. And, perhaps that question tells us as much about the present as it does about the future.
TJ Dean is the Associate Director of The Media Design Fellowship Program at the Wealth and Work Futures Lab.