By Debra Rich Gettleman

Have you ever felt an internal longing for something you used to have? Maybe it’s a job or a relationship. Maybe it’s that empty nest pain that pops up after each Sunday night phone call from your kid in college. The pain of losing someone or something that isn’t actually gone, can be as, if not more, brutal as losing a loved one who has passed.

Indescribable Grief

When the war broke out in Israel, my son, Levi, was in Jerusalem, and he did not want to come back to the US. I felt so distant and removed from his life. I didn’t understand why he was reluctant to come home. I knew intellectually that he wanted to stay and help the war effort in whatever way he could. But I couldn’t get through to him how frightened I was and how desperately I was praying for his safe return and the safe return of all hostages. That is when I started talking about this indescribable grief I was experiencing. Grief for the innocent Israeli hostages, grief for the soldiers who were ambushed, grief for the unknown horrors I couldn’t even imagine. I called my beloved Rabbi and friend from Temple B’nai Israel in Oklahoma City, Vered Harris, to ask her if what I was experiencing had a name.

She shared with me the concept of ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is loss without closure or conclusion. “I think that we have to start with the idea of non-ambiguous loss, to understand ambiguous loss.” She proffered. “When someone we love dies, we know what that means. It means, I don’t get to speak with them anymore. I don’t get to hold their hand anymore. They won’t be at the Thanksgiving dinner table. And as much as we grieve and mourn those losses, we know that there is a finality to them. We don’t drive ourselves mad with wondering if they’re going to walk through the door this time. Are they going to surprise me?”

Full disclosure, I’m the worst surprise anticipator on the planet.  I imagine these heartfelt reunions with far away friends and family at every imaginable turn. “Oh, I’m sure my husband who is working in a different city, will surprise me and show up at my birthday dinner.” Or, “Levi is just saying he’s not coming home from Israel. But surely, he’s on that last commercial flight out of Ben Gurion.” I can’t seem to not do this. Like I’m wanting something so badly that I mistakenly think I can create the impossible. And the disappointment each and every time grows exponentially.

Types of Ambiguous Loss

There are two types of ambiguous loss; physical and psychological. Physical ambiguous loss refers to people who may be missing or whose bodies are gone due to war, terrorism, or natural disasters. Psychological loss focuses on loss of emotional connection with someone who remains physically present. Having a relative who is lost to substance abuse, addiction, or Dementia, all represent a loss of cognitive connection. Psychological loss can also occur when one loses dreams due to financial setbacks or industry overhauls. In short, ambiguous loss refers to any kind of loss that doesn’t include death.

The term was coined back in the 70s by family therapist, Dr. Pauline Boss. She was working with families of lost soldiers and began to hone in on what she called the “myth of closure.”  Her universally acclaimed book, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief is considered by many to be the foremost authority on which much of today’s research is based.

As parents, we grieve losses daily. While most of us don’t actually want our children to move back into the house in their mid-twenties and early thirties, there is still a huge emptiness that they aren’t at the dinner table every night or holed up in their bedrooms playing video games. But, learning to tolerate the ambiguity of certain losses is crucial in developing resilience and moving on with one’s life.

Knowing my own sense of empty nest loss, I asked Rabbi Harris if that was a universal parental feeling. She told me, “I can only speak for myself. But I always wanted to be a mom and I always thought about what it was going to be like to have children, you know, raise children. But I never thought about what it was going to be like when they were raised.”

The Missing Hostages

“What about the hostages that are still missing,” I ask, “Does that constitute ambiguous loss?” Rabbi believes it’s still too early to know.  “There is still reason to hope and pray that the remaining hostages are going to be back into the  fold of their families, she tells me. “I’m choosing to keep that as my focus.”

We talk about the physical losses of homes and communities. Rabbi Harris tells me, “The areas, the kibbutz that was completely destroyed, that’s not ambiguous.” She insists that there is no one way to grieve, that each individual must find their own path to healing.

“Going back and rebuilding on that same land is still not going to be the same kibbutz, because of everything that’s transpired. However, rebuilding on that same land could very well bring healing to some of the people who have experienced what I wish was unimaginable and in many ways is unimaginable. Other people are going to grieve by never going back to that land again.

For me, the ambiguous piece is where we are right now. Part of ambiguous loss is not knowing how things are going to end up.”

Hope

I sum it all up by pronouncing that maybe ambiguous loss is simply a loss of hope. Rabbi Harris pauses for a moment before answering. “I think that giving up hope is one of the options you can choose in responding to ambiguous loss. For example, once you sit Shiva, you’re no longer in ambiguous loss. You have brought closure.

Ambiguous loss is more the debate of whether to give up hope or hold on to it.

And if I hold on to the hope, what is it that I’m hoping for? Because I might have to accept that my hope, that what I hoped for last week or last month, might not be what I hope for now.

The bottom line for Rabbi Harris? “I think that for me, the way that I sort of think about ambiguous loss is grieving what is lost while still recognizing what is present.”