Anticipatory Grief Essay

The use of the term anticipatory grief began to be used in medicine in the 1940s in the United States (Lindemann, 1944). The earliest study is using the term anticipatory grief is as follows. Straker (1950) study is a case study of a man who had had depression beginning early in life. Anticipating his wife’s death exacerbated his depression and brought on an acute stage of depression. However, interestingly, after the actual death, he had not experienced further grief because the feeling of mourning had already been worked through in the period of anticipating her death. Mourning refers to the feeling before loss in this case study. However, there is a disagreement about the scope of the meaning of mourning in literature. According to the definition by Rando (1986), anticipatory grief encompasses the processes of mourning, coping, interacting, planning, and psychosocial reorganization. Grief refers to a reaction, but mourning reveals the complexities of intra and interpersonal struggles (Bouchal, Rallison, Moules, & Sinclair, 2015). …show more content…
The meaning of anticipatory grief and anticipatory mourning need to be clarified. Furthermore, there are more terms related to anticipatory grief: bereavement, pre-loss grief, post-loss grief, pre-death grief, post-death grief, complicated grief, and preparatory …show more content…
Concept analysis has benefits for theory and research. This work helps clarify terms and develop tools and nursing diagnosis (Walker & Avant,