Ambiguous Loss

My dearest incurable humanist,

One of the reasons I started this Substack, as you may already know, was to process my grief. I have cried, read, sang, walked, stayed still, screamed, and sat in silence. Yet, I have truly found comfort and a great outlet in writing. Journaling, and this space that I share with you, with my stories about grief, migration, and art.

Last week, I mentioned to you my thoughts on how fleeting everything seems nowadays. I think this is deeply intertwined with the fear I developed about losing the ones I love unexpectedly after experiencing my father’s death. After my dad passed, I became numb, and it is easy to get stuck in this cycle where you feel that no one can understand what you are going through and wonder how people may continue with their lives as if nothing has happened when your whole world was completely shattered. Another common thing is for the few people who do care about you to recommend a thousand things to help you heal, a card reading, a massage, a new shrink, you name it. Among these things, a persistent recommendation was Many Lives, Many Masters by Bryan Wise. I may have the most unpopular opinion here. Don't get me wrong, the book as a book is great, very interesting, introspective, a source of knowledge, bla bla. Yet, I do not want to think about this. This is not soothing at all. Why on earth would I like to think that MY dad lived a life before me, and then will be reborn in a life after me? Why or how would it make me feel better to think that he will now have other children in another life that he will love more or the same as he loved me?

So anyway, in the midst of feeling all this, a therapist recommended a book to me that somehow aimed to understand this gap. The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change by Pauline Boss felt like someone finally understanding me. Boss coined the term “ambiguous loss” in the 1970s. She explains that these are situations where we lose someone, but the loss itself is ambiguous: people who disappear without a trace, people who are murdered, loved ones with dementia who are physically present but mentally absent, or relationships severed by circumstances beyond our control. The book argues that ambiguous loss creates a particular kind of Trauma because it defies resolution. There's no clear endpoint, no answers, no way to fully grieve and "move on." Rather than treating this as an individual psychological problem. The central message challenges our culture's obsession with closure, proposing instead that we learn to live with uncertainty and hold space for relationships that exist simultaneously in presence and absence.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing “ambiguous loss”, I recommend you read Pauline Boss to find some sense of comfort.