The DNA Model of Grief: An English-Language Exposition of a Non-Teleological Framework for Ongoing Loss

The DNA Model of grief by Verthriest & Maes in 2017, a Dutch-language framework almost unknown in English, denies grief an endpoint as a stated first principle: mourning has a beginning but no end for as long as the bereaved person lives. This article provides the first sustained English-language exposition of the model. It first distinguishes bereavement after a death from ongoing loss before death—progressive illness, dementia caregiving, lifelong disability—and defends extending the model, stated for the bereaved, to loss that is still occurring. It expounds the model’s three simultaneously active dimensions (connection, loss, and life continues) and its four guiding principles, and specifies precisely what kind of endpoint is denied: a normative terminal state of completed grief, as distinct from the reduction of acute grief and the recovery of functioning, which the model does not dispute. Because a non-resolution account risks legitimizing permanent suffering, the article derives from the model’s own structure a distinction between healthy endpoint-less grief and pathological grief, locating the boundary in dimensional configuration rather than duration and relating it to prolonged grief disorder. Implications for chaplaincy assessment, documentation, and pastoral posture follow. Claims about the English-language literature are limited to the frameworks examined, and the model’s single-source, non-validated basis is stated without mitigation.