A current event spotlighting a timeless and universal truth—that’s the sense one gets when reading Melissa Joplin Higley’s poem “Anticipatory Grief,” grand-prize winner of the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Drafted during the earliest days of the COVID-19 lockdown in the U.S., then tucked away for a year before revisions, it offers poignant scenes of a young child, Higley’s then 8-year-old son Milo, sharing his fears about dying and the techniques she helps him develop to make the worry less overwhelming. “I think part of [it] might be,” Higley said, “that if the parent worries, then the child really worries.… Those fears when the pandemic was first being talked about—and here, the earliest hotspot was a place called New Rochelle [N.Y.]… the National Guard had come in. they were closing schools, sealing things off. Well, his school was in the zone. So, we sort of got into it right away.” It was that year of space between drafting and revising that allowed Higley the distance to change her perspective, viewing the poem “more objectively and [to] revise it as a craft.”
While we’ve all seen reflections on how life (and writing) has changed in the months of the pandemic, part of what appealed to the judges of this contest about Higley’s poem was the idea that even before the global health crisis, children fear the death of their parents, and their own mortality. the same will be true decades from now. “ he says, ” this startlingly enlightened statement by Higley’s son, juxtaposed with images of worry dolls and tucking
