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Key points
- It's possible to grieve someone who is still alive.
- Ambiguous grief is something many of us will contend with at one point or another.
- Naming the feeling takes some of its power away.
There are things in this world that almost everybody—regardless of skin color, religion, socioeconomic status, or geography—will experience in their lifetime. One of those things is grief. And, yet, grief remains shrouded in mystery. One could argue that it ought to be a unifier given that we’ll all go through it at some point. Yet it makes us feel awkward to be around grieving people, so we resort to the path of least discomfort and we retreat.
And that’s just for “conventional” grief, the kind we experience when someone we care about dies.
Ambiguous Grief
But there are other kinds of grief, too, variations that are even less universally understood or acknowledged. One of these is ambiguous grief, which can feel just as cloudy as its name suggests.
Coined by therapist Dr. Pauline Boss in the 1970s, ambiguous grief means mourning the loss of someone who hasn’t died but is no longer physically present or mentally present. In the former, your loved one might have gone missing in war, for example. In the latter, your loved one might be suffering from dementia or drug addiction or, as in my daughter’s case, a degenerative disease that slowly took away her ability to communicate. With ambiguous grief, there’s no closure because the grieving remains unresolved.
Adding insult to injury, the person suffering from ambiguous grief might not even be aware that it’s an actual thing, let alone something they’re struggling with.
My daughter lost all functionality over an 8-year period. For most of that time, I was steadfast in my stance that I would not grieve my child while she was alive. I thought that would be a betrayal of some sort. How could I grieve for my girl when she was sitting right beside me? There would be time for that later, I feared, but not while she was still with me.
And, yet, the losses were real. I didn’t know it, but I mourned her sweet voice when she lost her ability to talk. I mourned the girls’ days we used to have together when we could no longer go shopping or get our nails done. I mourned the games we used to play and the way we once cuddled. I mourned the future I’d dreamed of for her. All of this was a fuzzy sadness, but not something I could readily identify.
The Power in Giving My Despair a Name
Then I learned about ambiguous grief, and my despair suddenly had a name. Now, I felt permission to grieve the very real losses my whole family faced.
Naming ambiguous grief doesn’t make the sadness go away, but it allows us to integrate the feeling into our lives. In doing so, we take some of its power away. When we know what we’re feeling, we can begin to address it and talk about it with others. By naming it, we’re validating it, even if it doesn’t have a greeting card or rituals that surround it.
Yes, it’s real. Yes, we are grieving. And, yes, it’s awkward and uncomfortable, just like the more traditional grief we’re familiar with.
