What it is
Anticipatory grief, also called preparatory grief, is grief felt before a loss that’s coming. It’s most often named before the expected death of someone close, and the person who is dying can feel it too. It also shows up before losses that aren’t deaths: a divorce, a job ending, a move, a child leaving.
The term goes back to the 1940s and is usually credited to the psychiatrist Erich Lindemann.
How it shows up for me
I’ve felt it the day before someone I love got on a plane. It didn’t look like sadness at first. It looked like regret about something small, as if the grief needed a fault to attach itself to. Naming it helped me stop blaming the small thing and just be sad.