An aircraft goes missing in flight. A hiker vanishes from the mountain paths. A soldier remains unaccounted for in a combat zone. Or someone you love doesn’t return from the shopping mall, from a night out with friends or from a forest stroll. Faced with a chilling event like this, it is a daunting task to come to terms with the loss in the absence of concrete evidence.Â
‘Ambiguous Loss’ is a term coined by Pauline Boss , to describe the kind of loss that is unclear, confounding and sometimes also insupportable with facts.
Ambiguous loss is not always about presumed death. There can also be a bewildering sense of absence in ‘presence’ in other instances, for example, when a loved one is lost to dementia; or a child is leaving home; when loved ones emigrate; or when we lose our cherished people to the wastelands of mental anguish or addiction. In these instances we lose some important dimension of our people even whilst still ‘having’ them in certain obvious ways. When a person close to us has loss of hearing, or vision, or mobility, or another permanent impairment, the loss and the loneliness deriving from it can feel significant too.
In our fragile natural world where countless species are going extinct and ecosystems damaged and lost, deep grief arises about a world that is ‘here’, yet also so much not here anymore and vanishing rapidly.
Relationship ruptures that are not repaired also have strong felt senses of both presence and absence that can feel agonising. Boss suggests that all relationships hold this ambiguity of presence and absence. When people 'grow apart' in relationships an acute sense of ambiguous loss can be felt; or when one person is much more invested and engaged in the relationship than the other.
Our ‘super-connected’ online world can also present perplexing ambiguities, feeling at times as thin and distant as it is foremost and ‘in our face’. It can feel desolate to find oneself detached in a connection-driven, densely populated virtual world.
How does one ‘come back’ from loss that is indeterminate and murky? Coming to terms with loss is difficult enough even when the facts are clear. How much more difficult when the actuality is indeterminate.
Ambiguous loss may not get the same recognition from the world as more clear-cut losses. It is therefore important to validate the loss for oneself, to delineate the scope and magnitude of the loss, and to make generous room for the particularity of one’s responses to it.
Without full closure, or with shifting ambiguities around here-and-not-here, it is much more difficult to pursue life fully again, and to find a ‘new normal’. Rituals and ceremony might help to make firmer ground. Loss and sorrow can be held in the containing generosity of ceremony. Rituals can bring slivers of meaning about a painfully new and unwanted order of things, and help to get us to navigate impossible thresholds. They can bring just enough fortitude to carry on. By providing symbolic accompaniment, they make our experience matter in a new way.
Ambiguous loss is patently 'unfinished'. Inexact, inconclusive and confounding, it is a something 'left dangling', suspended just out of range of what can be grasped and defined with certainty. It asks of us to live at close quarters with unknowing; to abide with a sense of neither-here-nor-there, to loosen the screws on what we need to understand in order to find meaning, and to keep company with unsolved mysteries.