What is anticipatory grief?
Anticipatory grief is mourning that begins before someone dies, typically during terminal illness or serious decline. It can include sadness, dread, guilt, and mentally rehearsing the loss, alongside hope and daily caregiving. Contrary to common belief, it does not reliably make grief after the death easier.
It is a strange, unwitnessed kind of grief: the person is still here, so you are not entitled to mourn, yet you are already losing them, sometimes daily.
What it actually feels like
Rarely like straightforward sadness. More often like an exhausting oscillation: fierce hope in the morning, rehearsing the funeral by evening, then guilt for having rehearsed it. There is grief for the person and grief for the relationship as it was, which in dementia and progressive illness can be a series of small bereavements over years. There is also, frequently, a wish for it to be over, which almost nobody says aloud and which is a normal response to prolonged strain, not a betrayal.
The myth worth correcting
The term goes back to Erich Lindemann in the 1940s, and with it came an appealing idea: grieve in advance, and grieve less afterward. Decades of research have not borne that out consistently. Expected deaths are not reliably easier to grieve, and in some circumstances prolonged caregiving and anticipatory strain are associated with worse outcomes, not better. It matters because people bank on it, then feel cheated and defective when the grief after the death is as heavy as anyone's. Anticipatory grief is not a prepayment. It is simply its own hard thing.
What helps while you are in it
Say the things now. The single most protective thing you can do for your later self is to have said what needed saying while it could be heard: gratitude, apology, plain love. Unsaid words are one of the heaviest items bereaved people carry (see writing a letter to someone who died).
Accept the oscillation instead of fighting it. Hoping and preparing are not contradictory, and you will do both in the same hour. The Dual Process Model describes exactly this movement between confronting loss and stepping back into ordinary life, and calls it healthy rather than inconsistent.
Protect the caregiver. Sleep, eat, keep your own medical appointments, and let people take specific tasks off you. Caregiver exhaustion is a physical risk in its own right, not just a mood.
Afterward
Expect grief anyway. Expect relief too, sitting alongside it, especially after a long illness, and know that relief is about the ending of suffering, not about the person. If you find yourself flattened after a death you had "prepared" for, nothing has gone wrong with you; the preparation was never a guarantee.
See also: Lindemann (1944) American Journal of Psychiatry, the origin of the term; reviews of anticipatory grief and post-loss outcomes finding inconsistent benefit; Stroebe & Schut (1999) Death Studies.