Anticipatory grief Anticipatory grief Anticipatory grief refers to a feeling of grief occurring before an impending loss. Typically, the impending loss is the death of someone close due to illness. This can be experienced by dying individuals themselves and can also be felt due to non-death-related losses like a scheduled mastectomy, pending divorce, company downsizing or war. The five stages namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her model of grief describe the process by which people undergo after a loss. Anxiety, dread, guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, and feelings of being overwhelmed are also common. However, it is
Kübler-Ross model Yale University obtained some findings consistent with the five-stage hypothesis but others inconsistent with it. Several letters were also published in the same journal criticizing this research and arguing against the stage idea. George Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, in his book "The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss", summarizes peer-reviewed research based on thousands of subjects over two decades and concludes that a natural psychological resilience is a principal component of grief and that there are no stages of grief to pass. Bonanno's work has