COPING without  CLOSURE

By Glynis Horning : Fair Lady May/June 2025

 Ambiguous loss is a uniquely painful form of loss: theincomplete and uncertain nature of it leaves you suspended betweenpresence and absence, searching for closure that remains just out of reach.

IN January 2015, a friend’s brother was one of three sailorswho went missing during the delivery of a catamaran from Durban to Phuket,Thailand. Radio contact was lost and no emergency location beacon activated,leaving the families stranded between crippling despair and desperate hope thatthe three were alive, washed up somewhere remote, but safe.

A year later, the hull was seen floating off Cape Recifenear Gqeberha, thousands of nautical miles from the last contact with the crew.As devastating as this was, clues to what may have happened to the men at lastseemed possible. Then, inexplicably, as the hull was being towed to Cape Townharbour, it sank to the ocean floor.

Can you imagine the pain of not knowing if a belovedbrother, father or son was dead or alive? It seemed nearly unfathomable.

I was still wrestling with this two months later when Iexperienced it first-hand. In March 2016, a year after my 22-year-old son hadbeen diagnosed with major depression, I got home from a late editing shiftto find that he’d disappeared. Simply vanished into the night. The days thatfollowed were agonising. Frantically phoning friends, scouring his haunts,putting up flyers. Unable to work, eat, sleep. Where was he? What was he doing?Was he even now knotting a rope, stepping to a cliff edge, wading into thesea?

The flyers worked – we got our boy back. The families of thesailors did not.

Then, three years later, our boy left again; this time, likethem, forever. Knowing the anguish of our uncertainty, our endless searching,he embarked on the ultimate voyage quietly, considerately, at home in his bed.This time we had no hope. But we had a body, still beautiful; we could hold aceremony and find comfort in the outpouring of love and support from thosearound us. The families of the sailors – and countless others whose loved onesare never found – could not.

Call it by its name

It was American family therapist Pauline Boss who gave aname to this loss without resolution, without closure: ‘ambiguous loss’. Shecoined it in the 1970s and used it to help everyone from wives of Americansmissing in action in Vietnam, to families of the 3 000 missing after the 9/11attack on the World Trade Center, where she trained grief counsellors. ‘What Idid was provide a name for a type of loss that’s been common, but had not beenacknowledged,’ she told Connect, a publication of the University of Minnesota,where she is professor emeritus in the Department of Family Science.

Ambiguity, Boss explains, can become lifelong trauma if itcontinues incessantly, leaving cognition blocked and emotions and grief frozen,and ‘severely hampering’ individual and family functioning. It is alsoisolating, as others may not even recognise you are grieving. Naming the loss,and acknowledging it as perhaps the most difficult there is, seems to quietsome of the turmoil of the bereaved, she says. And while there may never beclosure, even with a clear-cut death, resilience can develop – ‘the ability totolerate ambiguity’.

The instinct to recover missing loved ones runs deep in mostcultures, with attempts to retrieve bodies from everywhere, from frozen peaksand burning buildings to floodwaters and collapsed mineshafts.

Recently, it’s given rise to Migrant Disaster VictimIdentification Action, a network of forensic scientists developing newtechnologies to help identify the 25 000 migrants estimated to have died in thelast 10 years crossing the Mediterranean alone. And since the Israel-Hamasceasefire, work is underway to identify what the Gaza Health Ministry gives as47000 dead in the territory (The Lancet puts the toll 41% higher), many buriedbeneath rubble, haunting families scattered by war.

Psychological presence

Ambiguous loss arises not just when a loved one goesphysically missing, but also from lack of contact, even when their whereaboutsor what happened to them is known – in situations such as divorce, adoption/foster care, young adults leaving home, incarceration, and emigration. Bossdescribes this in the journal Bereavement Care as ‘physical absence withpsychological presence’; ‘leaving without goodbye/ goodbye without leaving’.

Dr Sulette Ferreira, a Pretoria based therapist whospecialises in migration and life transitions, says it’s estimated that almosta million people may have left South Africa since 2000 (although there is‘ambiguity even in the statistics of migration’). ‘For each of them, a void iscreated in the lives of their parents, siblings and beyond, leaving two orthree million or more affected in a country where family ties are deeplycherished.’

Ageing parents often suppress the desire for their child’sreturn in favour of their perceived prosperity abroad, she says. But herstudies show the emotional and psychological vulnerability of those left behindcan lead to a sense of loss, helplessness, loneliness, depression and anxiety.‘Remittances from emigrant children help ease financial burdens, but they can’treplace the emotional support and connection parents crave.’

While today much emotional investment goes into maintainingtransnational contact digitally, she adds, physical visits are the ultimategoal of most parents left behind. ‘The longing to be embraced, the touch, thehandshake, remain a hope and aspiration. However, if physical visits are notpossible, never give up the effort of keeping in contact and sharingexperiences and milestones.’

When it comes to helping parents find meaning in thisambiguous journey of loss, Dr Ferreira says there are no specific answers.‘It’s a personal, complex challenge. However, folk wisdom declares there aretwo lasting gifts parents can give their children – one is roots, the other iswings. Remind yourself that it takes a special parent to raise a child to havethe confidence and courage to undertake emigration.’

Psychological absence

There is another kind of ambiguous loss, says Boss, that canarise from ‘psychological absence with physical presence’ – where a loved oneis born with or develops a mental illness such as depression or autism,alcohol/drug addiction, or a neurodegenerative disorder affecting cognition,such as dementia or Parkinson’s disease (which my husband now has). Here, youcan experience the progressive loss of your partner and confidant, the loss ofdreams and plans for the future, and of your shared roles and responsibilities,and can feel you are no longer in a marital relationship if they no longer knowwho you are.

You need to focus on what is, not what if, says Dr Ferreira,and create a framework to help you navigate the difficulties. ‘Although thereis no clear-cut resolution to the grief associated with ambiguous loss, it isnot an insurmountable hurdle. Learning to live with the uncertainty brings withit lessons that allow us to process feelings of anger and helplessness. Thisprocess helps to transform initial feelings of despair and frustration into arenewed appreciation of life’s simplest yet most meaningful moments.’ It’s acomplex and unsettling form of grief, leaving the person experiencing it in asort of emotional limbo that’s not always recognised by society. It’s importantto know the signs, and find ways to cope. I am working on it.

Living with loss

Unlike other types of loss, with ambiguous loss, grief isunresolved – there is no closure. Instead of seeking that, and a return to yourformer reality, it can be more helpful to work on coming to terms with the factthat your world has changed and will never be the same, but that you can livein this new world with meaning – and even thrive, says Boss. After studyingfamilies in the aftermath of 9/11, she devised six guidelines for coping withambiguous loss. In Connect, she stresses that they are not linear, and that theaim is to help build resilience.

1 FIND MEANING

Focus on making sense of loss and finding a new purpose,whether writing a book (as I have done about my son*), creating art that drawson your loss, or turning it into a campaign to prevent such loss. My friend,Jay Savage, began writing poetry and lyrics, which have now become part of aformidable project initiated by his wife, journalist Diane Coetzer, andrealised by Dutch creative studio Affect Lab: Requiem for the Impossible. Thisinteractive and musical experience memorialises his brother, skipper AnthonyMurray, first mate Reginald Robertson, and young deckhand Jaryd Payne, just 20,and highlights ambiguous loss. It had its world premiere in Cape Town inFebruary, and the soundtrack by Lucy Kruger and Liú Mottes is on all streamingplatforms. For updates on future showings, visit affectlab.org/requiem-for-the-impossible.

2 ADJUST MASTERY

Recognise your degree of control in the situation. We hungerfor certainty. If you like control, you need to relinquish it – you may need tolive with not knowing for years, or even a lifetime. During the pandemic, Bosssays, it was no accident that so many people baked bread. ‘While they could notcontrol the virus, they could control the baking of bread and the certainty ofan outcome that was comforting.’

3 RECONSTRUCT IDENTITY

Ask who you are, now that your loved one is physicallymissing. Are you still married/a parent/a sibling/a child? With psychologicalloss, can you have a relationship with your loved one when they no longer knowwho you are? ‘Yes, you can honour your marriage and also have some socialrelationships for the sake of your own health,’ says Boss.

4 NORMALISE AMBIVALENCE

You need to come to terms with conflicting feelings. Whenyou don’t know if your missing loved one is alive or dead, or they are absentpsychologically, you can often wish for the ambiguity to end… but then realisethat means you are wishing the person were dead, Boss says. ‘This leads toambivalence and guilt for having that thought in the first place.’ Work toaccept, or at least acknowledge, ambivalence.

5 REVISE ATTACHMENT

Recognise that your loved one is both here and gone. Theymay be dead, and maybe not. They may come back to the way they used to be, andthey may not. ‘You learn to carry two contradictory ideas in your head at one Ltime,’ says Boss. Your loved one is missing, but you keep them in your heartand mind while you also reorganise your life without their physical presence.

6 DISCOVER NEW HOPE

You can’t just wait for your loved one to come back, becauseit would mean putting your life on hold, she says. ‘You have to discoversomething new to hope for. Frequently, the new hope is to help other peopleavoid suffering from the same loss you did.’

Through all this, it’s important to take care of yourself;to eat healthily, exercise and do what you can to sleep, to help you weatherstress. And if you find yourself depressed, anxious and struggling to cope,speak to a health provider or the South African Depression and AnxietyGroup (sadag.org; 0800 567 567; SMS 32312), which can put you in touch with acounsellor or support group linked to your type of loss, such as theAssociation for Dementia and Alzheimer’s of South Africa (adasa.org.za; 0860102 681).

❖ *Glynis Horning is the authorof Waterboy: Making Sense of My Son’s Suicide (Bookstorm). Her royalties go toSADAG.

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