(Written in early November 2025)

I’ve been thinking about fear and anticipatory grief for several weeks.  Here’s my question – is fear a kind of anticipatory grief? Let’s take a look at these two concepts.

Anticipatory grief is grief that comes before, in anticipation of a potential or known grief experience. 

When it first became clear that my husband, Robert, was dying and that he didn’t think he was sick or needed help, I found myself anticipating his death. I wondered if I would survive the heart-wrenching separation of our deeply intertwined lives. I wondered how life would continue. What would be different, what might remain the same? I wondered whether I’d have to move out of our house or if I’d be okay in it alone. I wondered if I’d ever be interested in loving someone in the deep, life-transforming way that I’d loved him. I was anticipating, with deep sorrow, what my life would look like without him. 

These moments of anticipatory grief were not stand-alone, solitary experiences. They were mingled in with work, graduate classes, time with family, time planning vacations, and surrounding Robert with as much love as I could give – which was A LOT.

Fear is both a noun and a verb, with many meanings. Two meanings jump out in thinking about a possible connection with anticipatory grief . . . a strong emotion felt in anticipation of impending danger (a noun) and a strong visceral feeling of anxiety (a verb). Synonyms for fear include dread, fright, alarm, panic, terror, and trepidation. 

Grief, even anticipatory grief, holds within it the historical meanings of its sister words mourn and bereavement. Bereavement means to rob or deprive. Mourn means to remember. Grief itself refers to feeling the gravity, the heavy weight, the oppression of the situation. 

Anticipatory grief as a kind of fear would be a feeling of impending danger of being robbed or deprived of a relationship, of a job, of a way of life. It is remembering past similar situations and trying to work through the visceral heaviness and oppression of the situation.  

If fear is a kind of anticipatory grief, how can HERO (hope, efficacy, resiliency, and optimism) help us navigate the experience?

Hope is both finding the way through and finding the will to move forward. Fear and grief can stop us in our tracks and paralyze us.

Finding even the slightest glimmer of a way forward, or finding an ounce of will to take a small step ahead, can give us hope. Those glimmers and ounces can come in the words or actions of a friend, or in an opportunity offered and then taken.

Or perhaps, as it was in my case, way power and will power were born of a fierce and stubborn love that found a way through the anticipatory grief and the fear of what the future held.   

Whether it’s through glimmers or fierceness, finding a way and the will to move forward energizes our hope.

Efficacy is a belief in self. When the fear-filled anxiety of anticipatory grief overwhelms us, or the oppressive panic it brings threatens to wipe clean our memory of how we are a force for good in the world, our efficacy can take a hit.

Tiny actions on behalf of another can help us build our efficacy. Remembering to feed your four-legged family members in the midst of anticipatory grief is a small win that can be built on. Remembering to do something that wasn’t written down, is another win that can be built on.

In my situation with my beloved, I continued to go to work and to go to school. Every time I got in the car and chose to stay engaged in life, even as Robert checked out, my efficacy strengthened.

Each win, no matter the size, can help strengthen your efficacy in the midst of fear and anticipatory grief.

Resiliency is the bounce back. This might be the hardest of the four to sustain during anticipatory grief. The duration and intensity of the anticipation can significantly affect your resilience. The fear of impending danger and the dread of change can stretch your bounce to its limits.

In my case, I knew Robert was not going to win his battle with himself. He didn’t want to win. My resilience suffered greatly as I constantly tried to raise his resilience back to life-sustaining levels. As I’ve said in other posts, it has been just recently that I’ve found myself again, and Robert died almost eight years ago.

How did I finally get to this place of being myself again?  It was by celebrating the little bounces, those moments of sustained resilience. I celebrated when I had good energy for more than an hour, then for more than a day, then for more than a week.

I recognized the things that helped me bounce back and did them more often.

For me, that was music, deep conversations, and doing things for others. Eventually, I realized that I was back to a full bounce. 

Optimism is seeing the situation for what it is and still finding positives. In anticipatory grief, optimism is allowing yourself to have strong fearful feelings of impending danger and still be amazed by sunsets, butterflies, or a gentle rain. You can dread the changes ahead, and your fear and anxiety can be at an all-time high, and you can still laugh, be joy-filled, and delight in moments of quiet introspection.

When you allow yourself to have positive moments in the midst of anticipatory grief, you are engaging your optimism.  

Is fear a kind of anticipatory grief, or is it just a part of anticipatory grief?  Either way, I’m sure our inner HERO can help us navigate our fear-filled anticipatory grief experiences.