Maybe not healing, but movement toward a different equilibrium

It's so obvious that the experience of the pandemic has left just about everyone spooked and perhaps a little nutty. Pauline Boss's little volume -- The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change -- speaks directly to a facet of what made the last two years so hard: so often the people who would have formed a support circle for sick people and for surviving loved ones couldn't be present with those who needed them. The horrible paradigmatic case is of couples and families who were kept from even saying goodbye to their dying members at the height of COVID infection fears. But all of us in our own ways lived with losses that couldn't be faced in the social ways we would have once thought only normal.

Boss' career and expertise is in helping people who've experienced the awful trauma which she named "ambiguous loss." In particular, she worked with people who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center -- no bodies, no mementoes, just agonizing uncertainty that finally morphed into certainty. Loss of this kind has particular markers.

Ambiguous loss is neither a disorder nor a syndrome, simply a framework to help us understand the complexity and nuances of loss and how to live with it. My focus is on building resilience to live with and thrive despite a loss that can't be clarified. Here, resilience means increasing your tolerance for ambiguity. As a result of the great uncertainty that surrounded the COVID-19 pandemic, the ambiguous loss skyrocketed and left some lasting effects for us to deal with for years to come, as individuals and as a collective. ... 

... Wherever they are, I write for the millions who are still unmoored by their pandemic losses and want to make sense of them. With so many sickened and dead worldwide, we are just now emerging from this great shadow of death. Life will go on, but it will be different. It already is. We won't go back to the way we were because change is both needed and taking place. ... What helps? Letting go of the idea of closure and instead, finding meaning in our losses, thinking both/and about the positive and negative, and finally, risking change by doing something different. ..

In addition to our pandemic losses, Boss insists that in the last few years, many of us have also been trying to absorb heightened awareness of murderous white supremacy and of advancing climate collapse. No wonder as COVID recedes (we hope), many of us nonetheless feel unmoored, a little at sea. And we need to understand, according to this author, that "closure" is a myth.

In the popular vernacular, closure is unfortunately used to describe the ending of the grief that comes after loss. The assumption is that you'll be "over it," done with your sorrow once you have closure. Not true. ... What I have learned is that even with the most extreme cases of loss, having no closure doesn't have to be devastating. ... I saw repeatedly that keeping loved ones present in one's heart and mind, even after they have disappeared or died, helps on to hold the loss and its grief without seeking an absolute ending.  

... the cost of seeking closure is that it's impossible and thus saps our energy and distracts us from seeing other coping options that could lead to more emotional growth and resilience. The benefits of not seeking closure are many. ... without needing closure, we can feel more rooted in this world because we now see more than ourselves in it. We are genetically part of those who have gone before -- and thus part of the human species. With continuity instead of closure, we are not alone.

As most readers of this blog know, I'm not much for psychologizing. But I found Boss' little volume humane, compassionate, and wise. Like most of us, I've felt surrounded by losses in the last couple of disorienting years -- especially by too many deaths (though none from the coronavirus) -- most not marked as we would have in the before times. We need to be gentle with each other. Boss knows that.