Recognized death: anticipatory grief experience of relatives of patients at the end of life

Abstract

The Home Care Service (SAD) provides home palliative care to patients with advanced stage cancer and their families. Mourning is a subjective, dynamic process, experienced in a unique way by the subject who has lost something/someone important to him/her. Thus, the objective was to understand the anticipatory grief experience of family members of terminal cancer patients, accompanied by a SAD, 11 family members with a heterogeneous profile participated in the study. The method used was the Focus Group, whose content analysis indicated that anticipatory grief was processed from three categories: meeting with the severity of the disease; family and care; psychic elaboration of anticipatory grief. It can be concluded that being accompanied by the SAD proves to be a facilitating element for the elaboration of anticipatory grief and a protection factor against a complicated future grief.