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Hi@sar-kat, welcome to the forums and our hearts are with you at this devastating time. What you are going through is a form of grief known as anticipatory grief. As you say it is an incredibly rough process to go through. Calling on you to muster up all your strength to be supportive of your boyfriend and treasure the moments you have together. And yet at the same time being weighed down by feelings of anxiety and dread. Anticipatory grief can bring up all the emotions of post-loss grief as well as the fatigue and stress that comes with caring for a loved one in this situation.
It’s important for you to look after yourself at this time. Practice self-care and treat yourself with kindness. Social support is a key self-care strategy that’s why we’re so happy you’ve reached out here – talking to others with a shared experience and knowing that you are not alone can be really helpful. We hope that you also have friends and/or family to talk to?
You might also like to take a look at our self-care tools here on our mindfulness page. In particular, journaling might be therapeutic in your situation… putting down your feelings on paper and tracking your grief response day by day will help to focus on your own journey. Because in situations like this we often get swallowed up by our loved one’s experience and forget that we too are facing something extraordinarily challenging.
We hope that there are others on the forums who can share their similar experience and perhaps the ways that they’ve managed to get through…
Let us know how you’re going @sar-kat. We are here for you. 🌸
