There Is Such a Thing as Grief Before Loss

Anticipatory grief, the experience of grief before loss, is an unspoken phenomenon, constrained into grievers’ unacknowledged concealment without language to communicate it. In this autoethnography, the author introspects two years of anticipatory grief experience during her mother’s dying of cancer and realizes its socially and personally unacknowledged and muted edges. To depict this isolating phenomenon, whose terminology was unknown to her while going through it, the author dives into three definable phases of her anticipatory grief: (a) re-learning her reaction to her mom’s terminal diagnosis; (b) re-dissecting the first anticipatory grief performances that emerged through practicing autoethnography; (c) and re-immersing in the chaos of grief through the last month of her mom’s life. Each phase exposes layers of anticipatory grief and embodies the grieving self as a split being, illiterate of grief language, isolated, and ashamed. This autoethnography concludes with implications and avenues to advance social grief ontology and ethical considerations when autoethnographically researching grief.