Grief Before the Grief: When a Parent Gets Sick

I found the translate button on my phone, and our family group chat has been forever changed. I am the daughter of Korean immigrants, and my mother began her first round of chemo this month, and those two things landed in the same week.

The whole sentence was three words

For decades I have carried this pressure in my heart that flutters and stretches like dough being kneaded, and it shows up every time I think about how much more I could say to my parents if language were not sitting there in the middle of us.

It never crossed my mind that my phone would be set up to do this with such ease, and it turns out it had been for a while, and I only found it a week ago. I turned on Apple Intelligence and started a new chat with my dad, my mom, my hubby, and me, and our conversation went from whether we ate today into updates on my mom's chemo and my dad's philosophical ideas.

Whether we ate today was the whole sentence. It was about love but it still didn't feel enough. Now I feel I have access to more words and can express the real me.

On using AI to reach the people you love

I understand that for many in my community, the idea of using AI sounds scary, or out of alignment with your values, and I hold that honestly. Progress and entering into new eras of the unknown brings up so much for a person and for the collective, and I am not here to talk anyone out of what she feels about it.

I also know that as a child of immigrants who, as they age, are losing the ease of speaking a language that was never their first one, reading and hearing text in Korean most likely brings my parents such joy, and creates so much less of a headache. If I can do this small thing to connect with them before they are gone, I am grateful.

Grief before the grief

I find I look for small but meaningful ways to reach my loved ones, little gestures that carry the whole weight of the complexity in how much I care, because I am so scared of losing any more time.

My mother recently had a port placed and began her first round of chemo. It is a low dose, a precaution based on what her doctors found, and no matter how gently anybody says the word precaution, it is still scary to her and it is still scary to me.

So I sit here, every day for the past week, riding waves of tears and fear, and tending to the little girl in me who does not desire to lose her mom, who has not yet been graced with the life experience of losing someone very dear to her. This initiation is going to happen.

At the moment the little girl in me is drowning in the waters of sorrow, unable to gasp for air, tormented by the unknown that lurks somewhere up ahead, and being prepared for yet another learning that will carry seeds of understanding beyond anything I or she can hold right now.

The adult me and my sacred witness holds space for these feelings so that they are not suppressed but are given a container to explore this unknown.

How often that is the case, no. We only know what we know at this point in our life, and it is through other experiences, new initiations, new mentors, new conversations, new guidance, that we come to realize what we did not know.

I walk with this often, because my clients were the ones who helped me recognize that the feeling pounding in me already had a name, and the name is grief before the grief. So many of my Gen X and Millennial clients have told me stories about their own parents, and in the telling they wove a bridge for me to stand on, and gently helped me see what I was not seeing, the way I do for them.

I believe coaching spaces to be exactly this. A place where we get to see what we were not seeing before.

And sometimes, with the assistance of a small button on a phone, we get to translate it into a language our heart can hear.

Yesterday Eric wrote a long message to my dad, privately and showed me the text in Korean. I sat there slowly reading it aloud, sounding out the letters and then translating it into English. I could have just read it in English but one, Eric wanted to see if it translated in a way that made sense to an English speaker and two, it is a way for me to practice my Korean so though my head was going to explode from focusing so hard, it was worth it on so many levels including my husband and my dad having a private conversation.

If you are somewhere in this yourself, the Magic + Medicine Quiz is a one minute doorway into the medicine you are already carrying, and I wrote a while back about what happens when a plan spills and it turns out to be the beginning.

May you trust the breadcrumbs already in your hands.

xoxo

Sora