Ambiguous Grief

Grief often feels pervasive, consuming, and taxing. Sometimes, grief is so immense, it is impossible to see outside of it or through it. It clouds our vision to the point of opaqueness. Thus, we are left feeling despondent, defeated, and hopeless.  
 
Grief is not only reserved for the death of a loved one. In fact, there is a type of grief that is commonplace and more universally experienced. Ambiguous grief is the grief we experience when a death has not occurred; rather we have lost something that either isn’t tangible, such as a hope or a dream, or we have lost a person in our lives but they are still living. And yet, despite how universal ambiguous grief is, we struggle to address it.
 
Even grief related to the death of a loved one is challenging to process. Much of this is due to larger cultural practices around grief. We are not a culture that provides the time necessary to process grief. If your loved one dies, you get three days to attend the funeral. But what if you have a miscarriage? Or you are going through a divorce? Or you are living in a global pandemic? How many days, hours, or even minutes, are we allowed to take off?
 
The answer is not enough.
 
Grief is uncomfortable. Oftentimes, we feel it is easier to ignore it, set it aside, or numb the pain. But in doing so, our grief is left unprocessed, which can lead to confusion of feelings, difficulty making decisions, increased conflict with family and friends, and emotional dysregulation. Unprocessed grief can make everyday tasks seem impossible to complete, meaningful relationships challenging to maintain, and our most treasured hobbies rendered seemingly meaningless.
 
Ambiguous grief could be used to describe how one feels after a divorce: you’re not only losing your spouse, but losing the dream you had laid out for your future. We experience ambiguous grief when someone we love is diagnosed with dementia, severe mental illness, or addiction. They as a human being are still physically present, but their psychological presence has changed dramatically, if not entirely. Thus you have essentially lost the person you came to know and love.
 
When one has a pregnancy loss, one grieves the loss of an unborn child. While the expectant mother never actually met the child, she is grieving the loss of her dream of who her child would become, the loss of life, the loss of what she thought her family might be. In that fetus, she says goodbye to a promised life. And, depending on how far along she was, the baby might already have a name, a due date, a nursery color picked out.
 
We even experience ambiguous loss for things that are not as tangible, such as a dream, a hope, or a vision for our future. We can grieve the loss of a dream job, or not being accepted to our top-choice college. And, we can especially experience grief as we witness our world struggling with illness, systemic racism and poverty, and political divisiveness.
 
 
How to Support Ourselves
 
Our culture does not respond well to grief. But we, as families and individuals, can start practicing ways to respond differently to our grief. We can identify ways that are more supportive. This can be challenging, because grief is uncomfortable and unpleasant. Asking ourselves to sit in discomfort is hard. As human beings, we naturally avoid pain as a means of survival. By asking us to sit in this pain actually goes against our natural survival methods! And yet, this is how we allow ourselves to move through our grief. It is important to process grief effectively.
 
Here are some ways we can start to process ambiguous grief.

1. Don’t “get over it.” Rather, integrate grief. I don’t believe we ever “get over” our grief. For one, I find it disrespectful to the event, the experience, or the person who is no longer in our lives (deceased or otherwise). By integrating grief, it becomes a part of our story, our lived experience. This allows us to increase connection with others who may also be experiencing the same thing. This doesn’t mean make the feeling bigger than it is. It simply means allowing yourself to feel what you are feeling, no more or no less. It gives you permission to feel, which in turn allows you to move forward.
2. Name it! When you experience grief, say you are experiencing it, whether to yourself, or a close friend or family member. Everyone experiences grief differently, and as a result, our grief can play out in very different ways. Some get angry, some stay in bed all day. Some overeat, some skip meals. But being able to recognize the behavior as a result of the grief you’re feeling is an enormous, mindful step.
3. Memorialize the grief. In “normal” grief, we often have a funeral or a memorial service, a formalized way to say our goodbyes. This is much harder with ambiguous grief. Yet, not having the space for this can often lead to us feeling stuck or trapped in our grief and unable to process it. Find a way to formally grieve, memorialize, and find a sense of closure. For example, when I was in my third pregnancy, my husband bought me a silicone ring for later in pregnancy to replace my wedding band. The ring was aquamarine, the future baby’s birthstone. I now wear the ring on my right hand as a way to remember our child. There are many ways to honor and celebrate that which we’ve lost.
4. Find a therapist or a support group! There are many out there, and they are not only wonderful resources, they can be essential to our process.
5. Make meaning. According to David Kessler, making meaning is an important step to how we process our grief. While this can be a hard step, and it certainly takes time to get there, making meaning allows us to integrate our grief and connect with others. By making meaning, we aren’t invalidating our pain. Rather, we are honoring our loss in a meaningful way, and weaving it into the story of our lives.

 
Processing our grief can feel challenging, overwhelming, and sad. Yet, in processing it, we are able to integrate it, and create peace within the difficult