After the goodbye. After you come home, empty lead in hand. There are resources for that - thin on the ground, but they exist. People talk about it, eventually.

What people talk about far less is the before.

The months or years where you love your pet with everything you have while quietly, privately, dreading what's coming. Where you do the mental arithmetic every birthday, every Christmas, every trip to the vet. Where you start making decisions - about holidays, about plans, about how far you're willing to be from home - not based on what you want, but based on what might happen while you're gone.

That experience has a name. Anticipatory grief. And it is its own particular kind of hard.

For us, it started quietly.

Cooper was almost 17 when he passed. For the last few years of his life - and I mean that honestly, a few years - there was a version of every significant moment that carried a small, unwanted shadow.

His birthday. What if this is his last one.

Christmas morning, watching him tear into his treat box with everything he had. Hold onto this. Remember this. When friends suggested an overseas trip, a voice in the back of my mind that I didn't always say out loud: I can't. What if something happens while we're away.

None of this was dramatic. It didn't announce itself. It just lived quietly alongside all the ordinary love and joy of having him - a low hum underneath everything that I couldn't quite switch off. I suspect a lot of people who have loved an older pet know exactly what I'm describing.

What anticipatory grief actually feels like.

It doesn't feel like grief, exactly. Not at first. It feels more like hypervigilance, a heightened awareness of time, of health, of small changes you might have let pass unnoticed before. You start paying closer attention. You take more photos. You sit with them a little longer than you used to.

There's often guilt wrapped up in it too. A feeling that thinking about the loss somehow betrays the life still being lived. That you should just be present, just enjoy the time you have, not waste it on a grief that hasn't arrived yet. But that's not how it works. You can be completely present with someone and still feel the weight of knowing they won't always be there. Those two things aren't in conflict, they're just both true at once.

The thing nobody tells you about anticipatory grief.

It doesn't prepare you.

I want to say that clearly because I think a lot of people carry an unspoken expectation that years of quiet mental preparation will soften the blow when it comes. That because you saw it coming, you'll be more ready.

Cooper's passing was sudden. Despite his age, despite the years of knowing somewhere in the back of my mind that every Christmas might be his last, when it happened, it still blindsided us completely. The grief was no smaller for having been anticipated. If anything, the years of carrying the dread meant we arrived at the loss already tired.

Anticipatory grief and grief grief are not the same experience. One does not replace the other. You don't get to skip the second one because you already did the first.

If you're in this season right now.

If you have an older pet, or one with a serious diagnosis, or one whose health has been quietly declining - and you recognise this experience, this low hum of dread running alongside the love - here are a few things worth knowing:

Let yourself take the photos. The ones you might have felt were unnecessary before now feel essential. Take them. Document the ordinary moments - the way they sleep, the spot they always choose, the look they give you at dinner time. You will want these later more than you can imagine right now.

Give yourself permission to grieve before the loss. You don't have to wait. The grief is already happening. Trying to suppress it until the "right" moment doesn't make it smaller - it just means you're carrying it alone and in silence.

And if you're avoiding things; trips, plans, commitments, because you can't bear the thought of being away: that's love. It might also be worth asking yourself gently whether there are ways to plan around it rather than avoid it entirely, so that your own life doesn't quietly shrink around the fear of a loss that hasn't happened yet. There are no right answers here, only the ones that feel right for you.

One last thing.

If you're in this and it feels lonely, the strange experience of grieving someone who is still there, who is still bringing you joy and chaos and love every single day, know that the loneliness is one of the hardest parts of it. Because it's not a loss you can explain easily. There's no moment to point to. No event that prompts the people around you to check in. You're just living with it, quietly, alongside everything else.

We lived with it for years with Cooper. And when the moment came, we were still not ready. I don't say that to be bleak. I say it because I think the expectation that we should be able to prepare ourselves fully for a loss like this - that love and time and anticipation should add up to readiness - is one worth letting go of.

You don't have to be ready. You just have to keep loving them for as long as you have them. That's always been enough.