“The Lived Experience of Anticipatory Grief of a Loved One and Reflections of Finitude” by Ava Figueroa

The Lived Experience of Anticipatory Grief of a Loved One and Reflections of Finitude

Ava Figueroa, Point Park University 

Abstract

The nature of this study consists of analyzing the relationship between anticipatory grief and reflections on one’s own finitude. A background of anticipatory grief research is compiled, beginning with the first study of anticipatory grief and later contrasting studies. Theoretical concepts of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida such as “ability-to-be,” “being-possible,” “the eternal moment of the now,” and more are deconstructed in terms of finitude. To further conceptualize these theories, Becky Millar’s 2024 article “Can Animals Grieve?” is analyzed for other researchers’ ideas of humans’ mortality and abstract perceptions of death in comparison to animals. Such concepts are supported and synthesized with a phenomenological study of anticipatory grief and personal reflections of finitude, in which 13 participants were interviewed about their experiences anticipating the death of a loved one and how it has led them to consider their own mortality through life.

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Introduction to Anticipatory Grief

We humans have been experiencing grief for as long as we have been forming relationships. Over and over again, we wrestle with the overwhelming, confusing, angering, and depressing emotions that follow the loss of a close loved one. Although grief is a phenomenon that each person will inevitably experience across all walks of life, at the individual level, it can feel like no one else on the planet has experienced such an intense feeling. When we realize the person that we lost will never again be there to talk to about our day, to hug or say “I love you,” or to have any new life experiences for themselves, we can feel like we have lost all sense of control we previously had. The death of our loved one pulls us out of our being and forces us to acknowledge our limited time with one another.

Knowing this about grief, what happens when we experience the grief of a loved one while they are still living? According to Reynolds and Botha (2006), “Anticipatory grief is a term describing the grief process that a person undergoes before a loss actually occurs.” Although the origin of the study of grief can be traced back to Sigmund Freud’s 1917 work “Mourning and Melancholia,” the first body of research pertaining to anticipatory grief specifically is Erich Lindemann’s 1944 study on soldiers’ wives during World War II. The wives of World War II soldiers went through all of the phases of grief as their loved ones were being threatened with death by the war. It was thought that such processes of grief before the occurrence of death would help protect the wives from a more intense impact of emotions upon receiving a sudden wartime death notice. Once the soldiers returned from battle, however, they found that their wives had disengaged themselves and no longer loved them. It became evident that grief work can be done too effectively in advance (Reynolds & Botha, 2006), which stimulated much research and debate to come. 

Many researchers found the concept of anticipatory grief controversial, as they held the belief that grief is exclusive to a loss by death and cannot be experienced in advance. In 1974, Silverman claimed that any experiences before a death occurred were not experiences of grieving in advance because “a rehearsal for widowhood was not the real thing” and “engagements are not marriages.” In 1983, Parkes and Weiss challenged the notion of anticipatory grief based on whether the relative stayed involved with the dying person throughout their illness. In 1974, however, Glick et al. contended that although the opportunity to prepare for a spouse’s death may have had a positive effect on recovery of the bereaved spouse, it was not due to any benefits that were mentioned in Lindemann’s 1944 study, but rather the subjects accepting the inevitability of the loss (Reynolds & Botha, 2006). The evidence provided by this study suggests that grieving individuals were able to use the knowledge of their loved ones’ deaths being unavoidable to help them cope with the loss before it had taken place.

In earlier clinical research, anticipatory grief has been found to have a positive adaptive effect by easing the intensity of grief for the bereaved after death. In a 1996-1997 study, Kramer found that women who experienced emotional separation from their husbands during the anticipation period of their husband’s death did not do so at the expense of affiliation (Reynolds & Botha, 2006). This means that, in contrast to Lindemann’s conclusion that grief work done too early can result in detachment from the dying spouse, the wives in Kramer’s study were able to emotionally separate themselves from their husbands without changing anything about the relationship or personal connection in the present. Negative effects of anticipatory grieving have also been found, such as in the study conducted by Clayton et al. in 1973. They found that subjects who experienced anticipatory grief did worse in the first month of bereavement and were no better one year later than those who were not anticipating grief (Reynolds & Botha, 2006). Lastly, there have been studies on anticipatory grief presenting mixed feelings. In 1977, Carey found that there was a significant factor in positive adjustment to the death of a spouse if the spouse had experienced prolonged, severe suffering (for more than one month) but not in circumstances where suffering hadn’t taken place (Reynolds & Botha, 2006). Overall, studies have conveyed mixed outcomes of grieving a loved one before/leading up to their death, incorporating varying factors of the inevitability of death, attachment, severe illness and suffering, etc.

Finitude

At the beginning of Iain Thomson’s article “Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death,” he shares three quotes, one from each thinker discussed, that serve as a good primer for conceptualizing mortality or “finitude.” In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud states, “No one believes in his own death. Or, to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” Then, on page 21 of Aporias, Jacques Derrida asks, “Is my death possible?” Lastly, in Being and Time, Martin Heidegger states, “Holding to the truth of death–death is always most/just [one’s] own–shows another kind of certainty, more primordial than any certainty regarding beings encountered within the world or formal objects; for it is the certainty of being-in-the-world.” 

On one hand, Freud proposes the universal unconscious conviction that “I will not die,” which he diagnoses as a common feature of the human psyche (Thomson, 1999). We all say “I know I am going to die,” but deep down, none of us believe it. On the other hand, Heidegger asserts that holding onto the truth of death reveals the primordial certainty of being-in-the-world (Thomson, 1999), which recognizes human existence as embedded or inseparable from the world, rather than individualized detachment. The mere facticity of losing our existence in the world is proof that we exist within the world at all. Caught between both sides of death and finitude, Derrida contemplates whether he himself is able to experience death, if he is able to meet with death, or if death is able to happen to him (Thomson, 1999).  

Heidegger comes to a paradoxical characterization of “the possibility of an impossibility.” He understands “existential possibility” as Dasein (human existence) existing itself through the constant charting of “live-options” or choices that matter (Thomson, 1999). The aspects that shape Dasein as a “thrown object,” such as roles, identities, and commitments, are all existential possibilities that Dasein forges ahead into. Heidegger further emphasizes the distinction between Dasein’s “being-possible” and “ability-to-be.” Heidegger claims, “As being-possible…Dasein is existentially that which, in its ability-to-be, it is not yet…Being towards one’s own most ability-to-be [i.e., death] means that in each case Dasein is already ahead of itself” (Thomson, 1999). We can consider “being-possible” as the ontological Dasein (the origin of being), understanding existence as an immeasurable, ever-changing object of being with a multitude of possibilities from the beginning. “Ability-to-be,” however, can be seen as the potential that Dasein holds to assert agency over one’s own existence and existential possibilities. For example, I have the ability to be a therapist, but right now, being a therapist is only a possibility and I am not a therapist yet. According to Heidegger, as being-toward-death I am ahead of myself, able-to-be what I am not yet (Thomson, 1999). In other words, we are so driven by the guarantee of death that, in a certain sense, we are already there through urgency to fulfill our existential possibilities.

In 1928, Heidegger wrote about expectance being ecstatic, or the causality of stepping out of one’s own being. Expectance implies a being-ahead-of-oneself and is the basic form of the toward-oneself. It is to understand oneself from out of one’s own ability-to-be (Thomson, 1999). Reimagine expectance in the context of anticipatory grief. When we expect (or anticipate) either the death of ourselves or our loved one, it requires us to step out of our everydayness and forces us to acknowledge our bare, temporary existence beneath the existential possibilities we have fulfilled to accept the possibility of the impossibility that death brings. 

The primary ecstatic concept of the future is approaching oneself in advance from one’s own possibility (Thomson, 1999). According to Thomson, through opening the “horizon” of futural ecstasis of expectance, the existential possibilities that we “press forward into” or “project ourselves upon” (such as teaching class, making dinner, etc.) return back to us as who we are (a professor, a husband, etc.). Thomson states, “Perhaps it is because without death…there would be no futurity, the possibilities we press into would not ’come back to us,’ constituting us.” Heidegger’s belief seems to be that futural possibilities would not matter to us if our embodiment was not thrown up against the limits of our own temporal finitude. Although we do not embody death, death is what allows the future to matter; it is the limitation on our embodiment that opens the horizon in which all embodied possibilities unfold (Thomson, 1999). Such existential theories suggest that because humans have an awareness of death and the fixed durations for which our bodies will live, we are given more reason to make meaning of our lived experiences.

Compared to Heidegger’s existential and phenomenological approach to death, Derrida contemplates how one can experience the act of death itself from a more rational view. According to Derrida, if death results in the cessation of experience, then I cannot experience the cessation of experience, so my death does not happen to me (Thomson, 1999). He perceives this phenomenon as “ruination” or “the final impossibility of dying, the disaster that I cannot die, the worst unhappiness” as this “impossibility of being dead” is a “mortal immortality” in an “eternal moment of the now.” Going off of Heidegger’s conceptualization of death, Derrida considers death to be the instant that shatters the illusion of instantaneity, or our feeling of existing in an “eternal moment of the now” (Thomson, 1999). Within Derrida’s thinking of death as an instant shatter, the condition of possibility becomes a condition of impossibility. If death means the loss of existence and possibility, how can we experience it? Furthermore, how does the experience of our death impact the possibilities of those around us?

Antony Daly also provides an analysis of death through the perspectives of Heidegger’s Being and Time and Derrida’s The Gift of Death. According to Daly (2007), Heidegger contrasts two ways of experiencing a carried phenomenon: expectation and anticipation. In expectation, we experience the possibilities of our lives (eg., visiting a friend), and we carry them unimpeded leading up to the event. Death does not function through expectation; rather, it functions through anticipation because death contains the possibility of impossibility (Daly, 2007). Because we cannot visualize the event of death in the same way we can visualize visiting a friend, there is no relationship between what is actual and what is possible; therefore, we can only anticipate it.

Each thinker possesses their own conceptualization of death. Freud believes we suppress the fact of dying even though it is a universal phenomenon that we speak about. Heidegger perceives the human condition as always being-toward-death, which allows us to live meaningfully. Derrida approaches death more literally, as it is an eternal stillness in time that we are incapable of experiencing. In attempting to better understand the experience of death, these concepts have been recently studied through animal research in correlation with humans.

Becky Millar

In her 2024 article “Can Animals Grieve?” Becky Millar provides a thorough overview of empirical and theoretical work to support her argument that animals do, in fact, grieve. The grief responses of animals are then compared and contrasted with those of humans. 

Many researchers of this subject go as far as to say that animal displays of grief are nearly identical to those of humans, with anthropologist Barbara King’s description of cats, dogs, and rabbits crying and searching for their lost companion, horses gathering around the grave of one of their deceased herd, and chimpanzees, whales, and dolphins carrying the bodies of their offspring (King, 2013). Despite these only being a few examples of the ways in which animals display grief similarly to humans, there is believed to be a complex level of comprehension of death that is exclusive to humans.

According to researchers Gustafson (1989), Price (2010), and Brinkmann (2018, 2020), it is understood that grief is particular in the way it is directed toward a specific individual, relationship, or death. Through comprehending death and loss, there is also a temporal structure that stresses the significance of both memories and the recognition of losses stretching into the future. Furthermore, a deep understanding of mortality and finitude occurs that appears to exclude animals and pushes beyond their capacity to understand death. According to Brinkmann (2018), grief is a “foundational emotion” in that it “places the human subject in a unique relationship to the existential themes in love and death that we do not see in other species.” Humans are ultimately unparalleled in such abstract experiences.

Susan Monsó’s seven subcomponents have aided in atomizing the conceptual understanding of death. Within developmental psychology, Monsó (2022) established the seven subcomponents to be: non-functionality, irreversibility, universality, personal mortality, inevitability, causality, and unpredictability. Monsó and Osuna-Mascaró (2021) argue that animals at least experience the non-functionality of grief, meaning that it causes their physical and mental health to dissipate, and irreversibility, meaning that they understand that the act of death cannot be undone. Humans, however, consider death more abstractly. If we return to Brinkmann’s deep understanding of mortality and finitude, the subcomponents of Monsó that humans’ grieving processes most align with are personal mortality, inevitability, and universality (Millar, 2024). In the face of death, we tend to consider the fact that we will die, that we cannot avoid death happening to us, and that death is a shared experience across all living beings. In an attempt to gain a deeper insight into what this experience is like, a qualitative study was conducted to allow participants to speak about their personal accounts of anticipatory grief.

Methodology

Through one-hour interviews with participants who have experienced anticipatory grief, I hoped to uncover the relationship between anticipating the death of a loved one and one’s own personal reflections of finitude throughout the dying process, as well as define the certain kinds of circumstances under which such reflections arise. I was able to recruit thirteen participants through a combination of random volunteering, references from participants’ friends, and selections I made based on the study’s criteria. I had a flyer for my study sent around my university’s psychology department and to everyone I knew, clarifying that in order to participate in the study, one must be aged 18-80 years of age and have experienced the slow passing of a loved one over the duration of one week to many years. I was also able to gain Institutional Review Board approval for the study as a certified social and behavioral researcher through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative. 

I chose to take a phenomenological approach to interviewing participants for the goal of maximizing detailed descriptions of lived experiences of anticipatory grief and personal reflections of finitude. This approach allows participants to share their raw, subjective experience as they recall it in an open-ended format. According to Edmund Husserl, every experience can be subject to reflection. “Through reflection, instead of grasping simply the matter straight out - the values, goals, and instrumentalities - we grasp the corresponding subjective experiences in which we become ‘conscious’ of them, in which (in the broadest sense) they ‘appear.’ For this reason, they are called ‘phenomena…’” (Husserl, 1935). To draw out participants’ reflections of their lived experiences, I asked the following questions:

1. Who was the loved one(s) in your life that passed away over a certain span of time (one week to many years)?

2. How did your loved one(s) pass?

3. How would you describe your relationship with the loved one(s) mentioned?

4. How do you find yourself coping with grief?

5. What aspects of grieving have you found most challenging to cope with?

6. How has the slow passing of your loved one(s) changed your own outlook on life?

7. What are the thoughts and/or feelings regarding death/dying that your loved one(s) shared with you before passing, if any?

8. How did those thoughts and/or feelings that your loved one(s) shared make you feel?

9. Has this experience led you to think about your own mortality? If so, what are your thoughts and feelings surrounding it?

10. Is there anything else about this experience you would like to share?

Each interview was recorded and transcribed into text, which I then bracketed and formed meaning units of participants’ responses. In doing this, I grouped together similar responses (e.g., “positive outlook on life after death had taken place”).

Findings

In regard to coping with the loss of her husband to pancreatic cancer in 2017, a participant said, “I have very strong faith and obviously I believe, I was mad obviously at God, but I didn’t give up my faith. I believe that God has a plan for everybody. I believe that everyone has a time. We don’t know that time and…I have to believe that it was the time (for God) to go to heaven.” When I asked the same participant about her experience losing her husband over a slow period of time, she expressed, “I guess there’s two terrible passings and obviously it’s a fast passing with a heart attack or something, a wreck or something like that, which is easier on the patient and harder on the family maybe. But the slowness, I felt that it was at least we had time to get our things in order and be together and help each other through it. I don’t think either way is easy, but I was grateful that I had time to prepare my mind.” Lastly, when I asked this participant about any thoughts or feelings her husband shared with her before passing, she said, “I believe the best thing that he ever said was the day the preacher came when he was originally diagnosed and said, ‘What are you afraid of?’ and Todd said, ‘nothing.’ So that made me feel better, that he wasn’t scared to die.”

Another participant shared her experience with losing her mother to leukemia in 2021. The participant mentioned that her mother was diagnosed in 2018, so she moved her mother into her home and took care of her through those three years. She said, “There’s a lot to be said for a quick illness as opposed to a very lengthy illness. But I do think that the lengthy illness makes you start the grieving process sooner. Because at some point during a lengthy illness, you change from praying for recovery to praying for peace.” When I asked if there was anything else about the experience she would like to share, the participant said, “I think the experience of taking care of my mother is unlike anything else. Anybody who tells you that they took care of their parent is taking on something different because it’s a sacrifice that your whole family makes. You’re bathing somebody that took care of you. Somebody who held you as a baby. You’re doing the same. It’s a humbling experience.”

Participant 3, who shared her experience with losing her father to Alzheimer’s and dementia, described, “When you see such a decline in a person who, with dementia and Alzheimer’s, it’s a horrible way to watch somebody go. So in the end, you know, grieving for them, you’ve already grieved for them, for the person that they were, and you were grieving in a different way because you’ve lost them, but you had already pretty much lost the person that they were years ago.” The same participant also shared that her son struggled with sepsis, urinary tract infection, and multi-organ failure since infancy and was on life support from 4 years of age until he died at 19. She said, “They said he’s not gonna make it to two months or two weeks that he wasn’t gonna make it. And then he’s not gonna make it to a year. And then he’s sick and they don’t think he’s gonna pull through and this and that. So it was like mentally I was planning his funeral and thinking songs I would play and this and that. And ironically enough, I didn’t even have any type of funeral, I didn’t want any type of funeral for him, I just wanted to grieve by myself. When they last told me that he was, in fact, not going to make it, and we decided what was best for him, it crushed me.” When asked about her sense of finitude, this participant said, “I was always so scared of dying because I knew if something happened to me that he would end up in a facility because there would be nobody to care for him. And after he passed away, I have like, I often wish for death. I’m not suicidal, but I don’t care about life. I don’t care if I wake up in the mornings where it’s like a 180 of how it used to be because I used to be so worried that if something happened to me, nobody would be able to take care of him. But now I really don’t care. And I would like to think that when I do die, I will be reunited with my dad and Owen and all the loved ones that I’ve lost. That’s my hope.”

Another participant who experienced the death of a close family friend expressed her feelings of finitude and death anxiety when she was almost diagnosed with cancer herself. “It has made me appreciate the fact that I’m going to die. However, as much as I would love to say the death anxiety has dwindled, I will say it’s just been replaced. Because I’m more okay with the idea, I feel like after all of this, I can appreciate the finitude in my own life and acknowledge the fact that like, alright, I’m gonna die, that’s okay. But now it’s been replaced with the fear of when I die…am I going to suffer?” She mentioned further, “I did [things] that I thought would make me feel infinite in the moment when I realized that my finitude was a lot closer than I had ever anticipated it. But now I sit here, and I’m just like…I could die tomorrow, but I don’t want to die a different woman than I am today.”

I was also able to interview an existential therapist about her experience with losing her closest cousin to sarcoma. “Being an existentialist in general, I think it’s important to know that we’re going to die and not be, try not to be scared of that because that is how we live, is knowing we’re going to die. So that changes how we approach life and how we live in general and make the most of the present. You know, we tend to be a very future-oriented species, but that takes us away from the small moments of joy and awe that we can experience in the here and now.” In regard to anticipatory grief, she explained, “there was something about the anticipatory piece of the grief that made me feel so guilty…guilty for being able to walk out. I had to call an Uber because I was going to the airport…how awful is it that I can walk out of here on two legs, call an Uber, and I’m leaving my cousin in a hospital bed and I’m never going to see him again…I have to do business as usual for the month, and he’s anticipating his death.”

Lastly, I interviewed two parents who had lost their son to Ewing sarcoma. When I asked the mother about the thoughts/feelings around death that her son shared with her, she shared, “My son knew…that the end was coming for him and he kind of made a bucket list for me that he wanted, there are things he wanted for me, things he wanted me to do…When he was it was getting near the end, the chaplain from the base came to visit him and I left the room because I thought…if he wanted to talk about anything, I didn’t want him to feel uncomfortable talking about it in front of me. When the chaplain came out of the room, he said, ‘he’s more worried about you than he is himself.’” When I asked the father the same, however, he replied, “the hardest, the very hardest thing, which I did not have an answer for was… ‘Dad I’m scared’...It was one of the hardest questions that was asked to me and I didn’t have an answer…It wasn’t ‘it’s okay’...it wasn’t okay…it ain’t gonna be alright…is it going to be alright with religion?...people say they have strong faith…but people are scared…He didn’t know whether he was in God’s hands or whose hands he was in…I didn’t know either.” This father continues to expand on this experience through the death of his own father. “The next step in death was when my dad died. My dad was in very good shape, broke his hip, got COVID, never recouped from that. But he was getting old, he lived a good life. I accepted those [deaths] a little bit more than Casey’s, because my dad says "I’m tired,” and my dad died in my arms. And it was okay.” 

Discussion

Drawing from participants’ responses, it is evident that many different feelings arise out of anticipating the death of a loved one and reflecting on one’s own finitude throughout. Some expressed a comfort in their faith and confidence in God taking care of their loved ones and themselves in the afterlife. Others seem to be less certain about there being a God or less concerned with there being an afterlife overall. One participant communicated that she often wishes death upon herself following the loss of her son, hoping that an afterlife exists where she will be reunited with her lost loved ones. Another participant mentioned that his son, who was dying of Ewing sarcoma, expressed that he was scared of what was going to happen to him through the dying process, and the participant wasn’t sure how to respond. On the other hand, one participant mentioned her dying husband wasn’t afraid of anything, which brought her comfort. Participants also indicated the significance of death in their lives, as being met with the fact that they will die has allowed them to live meaningfully in the present. Although there was an emphasis on guilt through anticipatory grief mentioned by one participant, another participant mentioned a transition from praying for recovery to praying for peace for the dying loved one. Given the variety of these findings, it is evident that there are a multitude of unique experiences with death itself and the anticipation of it.

Participants’ responses ultimately convey that anticipatory grief is a distinct experience from any other type of grief and there is a relationship between anticipating the death of a loved one and reflecting on one’s own finitude (or mortality). Through such a process, there seem to be many attempts at grappling with the concept of eternity. There is something about knowing you will never see your loved one in this life again, and not knowing whether you will see them again in the afterlife, that is extremely difficult to imagine. However, anticipatory grief can allow the bereaved person to begin the grieving process in the physical presence of the dying person, which can provide more closure than a sudden/unexpected death (directly aligning with Kramer’s 1996-1997 study of wives who were capable of anticipatory grief of their husbands without emotionally detaching from them).

Returning to the observational studies of grieving animals compared to humans, it has been determined that humans possess deep understandings of the mortality, inevitability, and universality of death that animals do not. This further validates the phenomenon of death anxiety and uncertainty in the face of anticipating the death of a loved one. If we look back to Derrida’s conceptions of death, our inevitable death can be frightening and anxiety-inducing, as it is an “eternal moment of the now” and a loss of our possibilities and potentialities. The moment we die is the moment our clock stops, and we can no longer fulfill what was once possible for us. Therefore, Heidegger counters this and emphasizes that this is why we need to especially revel in our ability-to-be while we still can. Having limited time in life is what drives us to fulfill our existential possibilities. 

Because the experience of anticipatory grief is so unique, further research can explore the development of therapeutic methods pertaining to anticipatory grief using existential concepts of finitude and meaning-making, as well as Monsó’s seven subcomponents of grief. The same concepts can also be applied to potential therapeutic approaches to end-of-life therapy for individuals who are anticipating their own death. I plan to further my own research in potential implications of mediumship and spiritual counseling in the grief process, analyzing how communication with lost loved ones aids in grief healing. I would also like to push for more phenomenological studies in grief because (very much like grief itself) phenomenology is ever-changing and always returns to itself through experience. As long as grieving individuals continue to have new experiences, they deserve to be represented and studied. 

Conclusion

This study has explored the complexities of anticipatory grief and its correlation to personal reflections of finitude and such implications of finality through life. Anticipatory grief is thoroughly defined and debated through observational studies conducted throughout the late 20th century. The concept of coming to terms with one’s finitude is further supported by the theoretical literature of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, which is then validated by Becky Millar’s 2024 article “Can Animals Grieve?” that depicts humans’ abstract perceptions of death, mortality, and inevitability compared to other animals. Lastly, my phenomenological study of anticipatory grief and reflections of finitude enhances these concepts through interviews with 13 participants who have experienced the loss of a loved one over the span of one week to many years.

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