What if There’s No Such Thing as Closure?

nytimes.com/2021/12/15/magazine/grieving-loss-closure.html

December 15, 2021

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Credit...Artwork by Amy Friend

By Meg Bernhard

Dec. 15, 2021

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When I first visited Pauline Boss in late May, Minneapolis was on the cusp of fully reopening.
Boss, who is 87, greeted me in her building’s lobby wearing thick-framed glasses, her light
blonde hair short and an Apple Watch clasped on her left wrist. She cautiously extended a
hand toward me. “Can we shake hands?” she asked, smiling. “Dare we?” We did.

The apartment was bright, with two walls of windows pouring sky into the space.
Bookshelves were filled with works of sociology, psychology and history; a section was
devoted primarily to Sigmund Freud, and another to Boss’s hometown, New Glarus, Wis. Out
the window, the Mississippi River churned under bridges, past the tangle of downtown.

The view, however spectacular, was not the apartment’s selling point. The elevators were.
Boss, an emeritus professor of family social science — the study of families and close
relationships — chose the place seven years ago because her husband’s declining health had
made it difficult for him to climb the stairs of their house near the University of Minnesota,
where she taught. His decline was gradual. In 2000, he was using a cane; by last year, when
he was 88, rheumatoid arthritis had rendered him unable to walk. Vascular issues resulted in
open wounds on his legs.

Despite his illness, the couple maintained a semblance of normalcy, entertaining guests,
going for drives and attending the theater, until last year, when the pandemic isolated them
in the apartment. Then, their only visitors were home health aides; once they left, Boss would
take care of her husband, changing the dressing on his bandages and administering his
medications.

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“It sneaks up on you,” Boss said of the burden of caregiving and its attendant emotional
struggles. She felt a range of contradictory feelings: gratitude for their time together, grief
over the loss of their old rhythms and anxiety at the inevitability of his death. Boss was also
confused about her role in their partnership. Once solely his wife, she was now also his
caregiver.

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With her husband’s drawn-out illness, Boss’s life came to resemble the cases she’d spent her
career studying. Nearly 50 years ago, as a doctoral student in child development and family
studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researched families with at least one
member who was either physically or psychologically absent. Her initial studies in the 1970s
focused on families in which fathers were too busy working to spend time with their children,
and later on the wives of fighter pilots who were missing in action during the Vietnam War.
The fathers were psychologically absent but physically present, while the fighter pilots were
the reverse. Each situation created a sensation of limbo for family members, a lingering sense
of grief over losses whose nature was uncertain.

Sometimes, as in the case of a death accompanied by a body and a certificate, the scope of
loss is relatively clear. But in the cases Boss studied, losses lacked such authoritative
certainty. There were often no bodies, and thus no rituals for mourning. Rather than being
tied to a specific event, these losses frequently extended over many years, deepening each day
in ways that grievers could not register. Could such experiences even be considered losses?
Boss, observing how families spoke about their missing relatives, coined a term to define the
unclear — and often unacknowledged — absences in their lives: “ambiguous loss.”

Over the next several decades, Boss studied and provided therapy to the family members of
Alzheimer’s patients, as well as the relatives of people whose bodies were never recovered
after natural disasters, or in the collapse of the original World Trade Center on 9/11. Theirs
were losses without “conclusion,” in the traditional sense of the term, an experience of
paradox — a simultaneous absence and presence — that eluded resolution. Can you mourn
someone whose body is present, even if the mind isn’t? Or whose death is unconfirmed? Can
you grieve a foreclosed future?

The concept, Boss maintains, is inclusive, encompassing a range of moderate to severe losses
that we might not perceive as such. It can take many forms, often quotidian: an alcoholic
parent who, when inebriated, becomes a different person; a divorced partner, with whom
your relationship is ruptured but not erased; a loved one with whom you’ve lost contact
through immigration; or a child you’ve given up for adoption. These experiences are an
accumulation of heartbreaks that we cannot always recognize.

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Freudian notions of grieving have taught us that mourning is a process leading to
detachment — a sort of closure. Boss finds this model misleading, perilously bound up in the
way Americans conceptualize themselves. In a new book published this month, “The Myth of
Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change,” she writes that the United
States is a place that privileges narratives of self-sufficiency and rationality. Elisabeth Kübler-
Ross’s linear “five stages of grief” model — which implies that if we work hard enough and

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follow certain steps, we’ll be able to get over our losses within a reasonable timeline —
remains a popular mode of thinking. But Boss argues that many losses do not follow such
models, and our reliance on them does not equip us to cope.

By contrast, ambiguous loss gives us a term with which to acknowledge the amorphous
nature of its emotional wounding. People are able to identify with this type of loss when they
have language for it. “Whenever you bring it up to somebody,” Boss told me, “they go almost
within five minutes to one of their own.”

Perhaps this is why Boss’s work has had a resurgence of interest among researchers and
journalists during the past two years, in the wake of the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder
and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In a time when the global community is grappling
with questions of atmospheric grief, she has broadened her attention beyond the family,
looking — along with her acolytes — out to questions of societal bereavement.

This influence isn’t sudden. After the 1999 publication of Boss’s seminal book, “Ambiguous
Loss: Learning to Live With Unresolved Grief,” numerous scholars began building on her
work. They published papers examining exile, foster care and traumatic brain injury through
the lens of her theory. Today, younger researchers have inquired whether urgent social and
political issues — the loss of the world as we know it as a result of climate change, or the
stifling sorrow of suffering consistent racial violence — can be understood within her theory.
This reflects ambiguous loss’s growing influence and breadth as a tool to understand why,
and how, we grieve.

Boss takes pleasure in mentoring younger scholars and seeing them apply the theory in
innovative and often surprising ways. “It’s like a bouquet of roses to me,” she said. “For me, if
the theory is useful, I feel good about that.”

Inspired in part by the queries, “The Myth of Closure” takes a sweeping look at racial unrest
and the pandemic while refuting the idea that grief has a prescribed endpoint. In some
regards, the book is a testament to the ways in which these researchers have pushed her
thought in new directions, particularly on race. “Now, after much thinking since that fateful
Memorial Day when George Floyd was killed, here in my hometown of Minneapolis,
combined with the questions coming to me from around the world, I have expanded my ideas
about ambiguous loss,” she writes. “It can happen to one person, one family, a local
community or the global community.”

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“The Myth of Closure” is also her attempt to make sense of simultaneously unfolding
catastrophes in her personal life and around the world. “This is the first time I’ve raised
ambiguous loss to a higher level regarding the pandemic, a societal level,” Boss told me. In

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trying to describe losses that society doesn’t always recognize, Boss might be helping us to
rethink the nature of loss altogether.

Image

Pauline Boss at her home in Minneapolis, Minn.Credit...Alec Soth for The New York Times

Boss emanates the wisdom of a lifetime spent focused on an idea. Her manner is
thoughtful and serene. During our conversation, she chose her words carefully, gazing out
the window while searching for the best possible formulation. Her work can be grim in
nature, but she is quick to laugh and delights in small pleasures — on her birthday, she was
content to go for vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips. Though her oeuvre is vast — eight
books, more than a hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters, thousands of citations
spanning some 44 years — she responded to my questions by drawing from a well-kept
archive, recounting decades-old anecdotes and arguments with ease.

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The daughter of a tenant farmer and a homemaker, Boss grew up in New Glarus, a Wisconsin
village populated mostly by Swiss immigrants, including her father. He came to the United
States during the 1920s to study agriculture, intending to return to Switzerland to marry.
Then the Great Depression hit. He was stuck.

Eventually, Boss’s father married and started a family in America, working with dairy cows
and growing crops. He missed his home, but he wasn’t sure that he could ever return. Boss
noticed he sometimes became distant, especially when letters arrived from Switzerland.
“Homesickness became a central part of my family’s culture,” Boss wrote in her 1999 book.
“Longing for faraway family members was so common that at an early age I became curious
about this unnamed loss and the melancholy that never went away. It was all around me.”

In 1952, Boss started college in Madison. At the time, it was rare for a girl from her village to
study beyond high school. Most married upon graduation, and Boss herself married as a 19-
year-old college student. Yet she was eager to learn about a world beyond the farmland of
southern Wisconsin, where going out on the weekend meant a Friday-night fish fry and
dancing the polka.

After college, she studied for a master’s degree in child development and family studies,
writing her thesis on the cultural roles across three generations of Swiss American and Amish
women in her hometown. Excited by this “kitchen table research,” in which anecdotal
information gleaned from hours of conversation became the data, Boss embarked on an
academic career that existed at the edge of disciplines, in the relatively unknown field of
family social science.

As a doctoral student in the early 1970s, she developed the theory for which she is best
known. Invited to observe a psychiatrist’s sessions at the university’s family-therapy clinic,
she “noticed that the fathers were always angry about being there. And they said, ‘The
children are mothers’ business. Why am I here?’” Boss told me. The fathers, many of whom
worked corporate jobs, were too preoccupied to help raise their children. She termed the
phenomenon “psychological father absence in intact families,” but a professor who taught her
theory-development course pushed her to think bigger. In retrospect, Boss says, she could
have spent the next decade writing solely about fathers. Instead, following her professor’s
advice, she landed on a broader research concept: ambiguous loss.

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Her father’s estrangement from his European family, and his emotional absence from his
American one, were the germs of Boss’s theory. She now knows that her father was
experiencing ongoing grief in which no death had occurred; while she realized then that what
she felt was the ambiguity, the loss was vague. Theorizing a category of loss would help Boss,
fellow academics and laypeople make sense of griefs whose origins and parameters were
equally unclear.

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 The loss’s immeasurability doesn’t negate its existence — or its
crippling effects.

Image

Credit...Artwork by Amy Friend

Over the next 45 years, as a researcher and therapist, Boss worked with thousands of families
who struggled with similar dynamics. Often she was called to provide emergency therapy for
people whose relatives were missing following a disaster. Meanwhile, she was coping with
her own personal tragedies — the deaths of both of her parents, and her sister.

Boss found that ambiguous loss can result in what she termed “frozen grief,” when people are
stuck in their sorrow; or “disenfranchised grief,” a term coined by the mental-health
counselor Kenneth J. Doka to describe when others do not see a significant loss as legitimate
or deserving of support. To that end, her work diverges from historical grief research, which
has considered sorrow something to overcome. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” first
published in 1917, promoted detachment from the deceased as a healthy grief response, and
therapists following this model counseled their clients to let go of whomever they had lost.
Such training focused on helping clients seek “closure,” an endpoint to grief.

Rejecting linear models, Boss offers six nonsequential guidelines meant to help people bear
their grief: making meaning out of loss; relinquishing one’s desire to control an
uncontrollable situation; recreating identity after loss; becoming accustomed to ambivalent

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feelings; redefining one’s relationship with whatever or whomever they’ve lost; and finding
new hope. Two of the guidelines, “meaning” and “new hope,” are especially important for
coping, intended to help people consider what the loss signifies in their lives and how they
can imagine a future that contains their loss.

Boss draws from the work of thinkers who challenge presumptions of linearity in the grief
process and provide language that breaks free from the confines of Freud’s formal writings.
She finds inspiration in the writings of Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychotherapist and
concentration-camp survivor, who wrote of searching for meaning in loss, and the
psychologist Dennis Klass, whose theory of “continuing bonds” offers a paradigm of
bereavement in which mourners maintain a relationship — if only psychological — with the
deceased. “While simplistic declarations of closure are comforting for bystanders, they are
hurtful for the bereaved,” Boss writes. “If we have loved, we will want to remember.”

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 Image

Proposal and manuscript for Boss’s “The Myth of Closure.”Credit...Alec Soth for The New York
Times

I first encountered Boss’s ideas in July 2020. My grandfather had just died of Covid-19,
which he contracted at his care facility near Dallas. My mother, brother and I had driven
halfway across the country to say goodbye to him through a closed window. Because he had
Alzheimer’s, I had spent years trying to say goodbye, but this final time was abrupt, ragged
like a wound reopened. We told him we loved him, and he struggled for air. After two days of
this, he died in the night.

One afternoon about a week later, while waiting to pick up his ashes, I heard Boss on a 2016
episode of the podcast “On Being.” Her voice, clear yet gentle, cut through the air-
conditioner’s thrum as she spoke with Krista Tippett, the show’s host. “We’re not comfortable
with unanswered questions,” Boss said. “These are losses that are minus facts.” I wasn’t
alone. During the pandemic, Tippett noticed that people were posting on social media about

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that interview. “People were saying, ‘I’m listening to this again, it’s really helping me,’”
Tippett said. She decided to invite Boss back onto the show to discuss how her theory might
apply to the pandemic. They talked about “losses not just of life but of livelihood, of
possibility, of dreams, of plans, of things that seemed certain yesterday,” Tippett told me.

Boss had given me a theory for my own life — and language to describe the prolonged nature
of my loss. For nearly a decade, my grandfather had succumbed to Alzheimer’s, until he could
no longer remember my name or face. At the end of his life, we lived far apart, and that
distance made it difficult to see him, a reality that now haunted me. There was a temporal lag
in my experience of loss; though he was now irrefutably gone, I’d been losing my grandfather
for years. His death dredged up old feelings of guilt and regret. I mourned the time we never
spent together, the questions I never asked. Ambiguous loss seemed to explain this long,
unsettled grief.

“The Myth of Closure” describes the complicated experience of mourning during the
pandemic. “To all of you who are grieving someone or something you loved and lost during
this pandemic, may I say this?” Boss writes. “It is not closure you need but certainty that your
loved one is gone, that they understood why you could not be there to comfort them, that
they loved you and forgave you in their last moments of life. Without these things, some
doubts may linger for you, but that is the nature of loss. Its ending is never perfect, even in
the best of times.”

Boss intends for the book, a relatively slim text comprising nine chapters, to be therapeutic.
It’s a hybrid work: a self-help book providing strategies for coping with ambiguous loss, but
also a document of observations from 40-plus years researching and counseling families, and
a personal meditation on love and loss. While her old arguments — against binary thinking;
in favor of accepting paradox — are the foundation, the book is also a response to
overwhelming global catastrophes of late. “This worldwide health crisis brought many
ambiguous losses,” she writes. “Loved ones died alone in hospitals with no family allowed, all
losing the comfort of a last goodbye; students lost rituals of graduation and saying goodbye to
classmates, as well as the chance to meet new friends at the beginning of a new academic
year; younger children were schooled at home, many alone in their rooms in front of a
computer; others struggled because they had no broadband, computer or internet access. The
critical experiences that traditionally marked growing up were lost — a surreal experience for
the young as well as their parents.”

Outlining why these losses are ambiguous, Boss considers the theory’s two original
categories: “physical” and “psychological.” “The first is physical — no body to bury, no proof
of death. We see this now with Covid-19 deaths, where families are not allowed to view the
body or have the usual funeral rituals of mourning and burial,” she writes, describing the
pandemic’s early days. Psychological absences can also include obsessions or preoccupations,
she continues, noting that many people have been “preoccupied with worry and anxiety
about the virus.” Social distancing was also an ambiguous loss, she argues; unable to visit
loved ones, we were psychologically present but physically absent.

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The theory is “not as narrow as it was in the inception” — a positive development, Boss told
me, because more people can find the concept meaningful in their own lives. Researchers
have expanded the original two categories to include applications beyond the family. “The
theory of ambiguous loss has left my desk long ago,” she said.

While Boss cautions that “ambiguous loss can’t be a theory of everything,” she also
acknowledges that ambiguity is difficult to measure. “It is perceptual, in the person’s mind,”
she told me, making its study particularly personal. Social scientists like herself assess
whether something may be considered an ambiguous loss based on qualitative interviews,
plus some quantitative data. How interviewees describe their loss is a key indicator of
whether it is ambiguous. Boss gives examples of such language in her work: “Am I married or
not since my husband has been missing for decades?” “How do I answer how many children I
have when I gave one up for adoption?”

When asked to define the theory, Boss simply says it is “an unclear loss that can be physical
or psychological and it has no resolution.” Undergirding the idea are core assumptions that
speak to its subjectivity, the first of which states that “a phenomenon can exist even if it
cannot be measured.” In other words, the loss’s immeasurability doesn’t negate its existence
— or its crippling effects. Second, she assumes that, when it comes to ambiguous loss, there is
no single narrative that can explain a deprivation; subjectivity colors our perception of loss.
The goal of social scientists and therapists should be to determine how people can live well
despite not knowing or understanding the scope of their loss. Third, ambiguous loss is a
relational phenomenon, based on attachment.

That ambiguous loss is so broad may be frustrating to those who crave absolute parameters.
But its haziness is the point. “It’s a theory about imprecision, and how do those of us who like
precision live with such ambiguity,” Boss told me. If ambiguous loss seems to encompass an
impossibly large field, it is because the researchers and writers following after Boss see its
potential to reshape society’s expectations for grief.

‘It is not closure you need but certainty that your loved one is
gone, that they understood why you could not be there to
comfort them, that they loved you and forgave you in their last
moments of life.’

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 Image

Credit...Artwork by Amy Friend

Last year, Boss received a flood of public and scholarly inquiries about one particular
application of the theory: racism as ambiguous loss. In May 2020, George Floyd was
murdered, just a few miles south of Boss’s apartment. Younger scholars had already begun
using her framework to research the extreme stresses of racism, and now, following their
lead, Boss turned her attention to a loss pervasive in her own city.

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In “The Myth of Closure,” Boss contributes to the already robust study of slavery’s traumatic
aftermath. She suggests that losses from slavery — the experience of being wrenched from
home and family, of losing control over one’s own body — were ambiguous. These
relationship ruptures, which to me recall the sociologist Orlando Patterson’s theory that
enslavement caused “social death,” produced a generational transmission of trauma,
“remembered today in the bodies and minds of their descendants,” and omnipresent in the
systems that continue to oppress Black people today. Boss draws from scholarship in family
therapy, sociology and social work, particularly the work of Elaine Pinderhughes, who, she

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writes, “was one of the first to teach me that historical context matters for human
development and that being traumatized instead of nurtured will affect not only children, but
also their own offspring as well.”

The harrowing video of George Floyd’s murder catalyzed an intense outpouring of grief and
anger, a manifestation of omnipresent racial trauma. That continual trauma, Boss suggests,
is where ambiguous loss lies. Scholars have long studied racism as a source of stress and grief
— in the 1970s, the psychiatrist Chester Pierce wrote about the stressful “mundane extreme
environment” in which Black Americans live — but now family scientists are finding new
resonance in Boss’s work to explain how racism can produce ambiguous losses in Black
families and communities.

One scholar applying the framework is Chalandra Bryant, a professor of family social science
at the University of Minnesota. While researching marriage in Black Southern families in the
mid-2000s, Bryant met a woman who confided that her husband was acting unusually
withdrawn. Although he was still functioning — going to work, picking up his child from
school — he was emotionally vacant. Bryant learned that news reports about racist incidents
and his child’s experiences in school had deeply affected him. “It turns out that he was
depressed and apprehensive and he couldn’t quite put his finger on why,” Bryant said. He felt
“he had no control over making sure that his family felt safe.”

Bryant sees Boss’s theory as important to understanding the effects of stressors. Racism, she
says, is a stressor impacting the lives of Black Americans. “That could leave a culture
wondering, Where do I fit here? Who are we as a culture that so many people can feel such
hatred toward us?” Bryant, who is Black, said, “I think that can make people wonder or think
about where they fit in society.”

Today Bryant is working with a team on a project that examines financial strain on Black
families through the lens of Boss’s theory. Racist housing policies historically prevented
Black Minneapolis residents from accumulating wealth; today only 25 percent own homes in
the metropolitan area, compared with 77 percent of white residents — the largest
homeownership gap of any major American city. Financial stress, Bryant says, can contribute
to people losing their sense of self, often without understanding why. In this way, the
nebulous effects of anti-Black racism permeate the psyche.

In mid-July, I returned to Minneapolis and asked Boss to accompany me to the intersection

of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, known as George Floyd Square. In May, the intersection
was closed to traffic, inviting mourning, meditation and protest. Now I saw that the offerings
and gardens previously occupying the space were moved to make room for cars. A silhouette
of Floyd, facedown with wings sprouting from his shoulders — marking the spot where the
police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck — was now surrounded by concrete barriers to
protect against traffic.

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We ran into a man named Jay Webb, a volunteer gardener. He cried out when he learned
Boss’s name. “Your line of thinking has helped me,” he said excitedly, rushing to grab his
phone for a selfie. Webb said he encourages visitors to accept their grief and search for peace,
sentiments that echoed Boss’s thought. It was clear her work had expanded into the public
sphere, moving people in her own city. Webb told Boss, “You are so, so needed here.”

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The theory of ambiguous loss originated in the families and communities she studied and
counseled decades ago, and encounters with everyday people like Webb continue to shape
her thinking. Boss, who considers herself a lifelong student, learns from these people. “I need
to keep my eyes open,” Boss told me after we visited George Floyd Square. She recognizes the
limits of her knowledge, and expresses gratitude for people who, even in the twilight of her
career, have pushed those limits. With “The Myth of Closure,” Boss is learning in public. The
resulting book emerged from reflection during the first months of the pandemic, as a
response to “what was happening around me at the time,” she says. “I realized that, not only
was I changing, but that the people who were writing to me were writing about different
things,” she told me, which “stimulated my own rethinking, new thinking.”

And though she is an expert on loss, Boss is herself learning how to grieve. In the summer of
2020, her husband’s health took a turn for the worse. First, he was hospitalized. Then, a few
weeks later, he was transferred to a rehabilitation facility. One evening, Boss noticed her
husband couldn’t pick up his spoon, so she fed him instead. But he seemed his normal, genial
self, and a nurse said he was improving. Boss left for the evening; he blew her a kiss goodbye.
At 10 that night, a doctor called. Her husband was unresponsive. Boss and her daughter
rushed to the facility, and there they learned he’d had a stroke. The staff brought them chairs
to rest, but they couldn’t sleep. In the morning, Boss’s daughter left to take a shower at home,
and when she returned suggested that her mother do the same.

Boss, however, said she would stay. “Everybody in my life — my father, my mother, my sister,
my brother — died when I turned my back and left,” Boss told me, her voice wavering. A
heaviness settled over our conversation. “And I said, ‘I’m not leaving.’ And then I looked at
him and within about five minutes he took his last breath.”

Meg Bernhard is a writer from California. Her essay on shared grief, “Water or Sky?” was
anthologized in the Best American Travel Writing 2021, and she is at work on a book for
Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

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