Your Pandemic Sadness Is Called ‘Ambiguous Loss’

Therapist Pauline Boss explains why it’s harder to grieve in the face of uncertainty—and why ambiguous loss is everywhere in 2021

We’re stuck mourning a world that isn’t gone, but also isn’t here. Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash

I spent most of the pandemic grieving, though, at the time, I didn’t think I was sad about the pandemic itself. Everyone around me seemed to have specific losses. Their loved ones had died, or they had long Covid. They had friends they couldn’t see or jobs they’d lost. I was isolated before lockdown — I’d moved to a new town where I didn’t know anyone, and having a toddler made it hard to socialize — and my job was never at risk. My family was lucky; the virus mostly passed us by.

So there wasn’t any clear reason for the sorrow that overwhelmed me. I spent lockdown obsessing over incidents from ten or twenty years ago, getting teary-eyed during uneventful family dinners. Certain memories came back so often I could set my watch by them: A childhood friend who skipped town and seemingly disappeared, or my estranged biological father, who was diagnosed with dementia, making reconciliation effectively impossible. The grief was obsessive, repetitive, embarrassing. I couldn’t move on, no matter what I tried. I wore myself out with sadness, got sick of my own sadness, and I was still sad.

Finally, over a year into this, someone dropped the phrase I needed: “Ambiguous loss.” The theory, originated by Dr. Pauline Boss, describes a type of grief that is unusually prolonged and painful because some key element remains uncertain. The spouse of a soldier missing in action becomes Schrödinger’s Widow, married to someone who is both alive and dead. The child of a woman with Alzheimer’s might lose his mother, yet be unable to mourn her — she’s still alive, she just doesn’t recognize him any more.

Being unable to determine whether something is here or gone, living or dead, ongoing or over, is what makes a loss ambiguous — and that feeling is what the pandemic has inflicted on most of us. Families separated by travel precautions knew that they would see each other again, but not when. Friends and communities and favorite places were psychologically present — we still considered ourselves part of the community, the neighborhood, the friendship — but physically out of…