“As soon as I get their ashes, I’ll have closure.” “As soon as I see their death certificates, I’ll have resolution.” This is what I told myself while waiting for the package from my oldest sister that contained my parents’ ashes and death certificates. The box and certificates have arrived, but closure and resolution have not, and perhaps never will.

I am a sufferer of “ambiguous loss” — a term developed by social scientist Pauline Boss who believes that death unaccompanied by a body and a certificate renders the scope of loss unclear. “No rituals for mourning become losses without ‘conclusion’ in the traditional sense of the term,” Boss says in a New York Times magazine article (12/15/21) entitled, “What if There’s No Such Thing as Closure?” Over at least four decades, Boss has provided therapy to the family members of Alzheimer’s patients as well as the relatives of people whose bodies were never recovered in natural disasters or in the collapse of the original World Trade Center on 9/11 or during the COVID pandemic. Losses can also be more quotidian: “an alcoholic parent who, when inebriated, becomes a different person; a divorced partner with whom your relationship is ruptured but not erased; a loved one with whom you’ve lost contact through immigration; or a child given up for adoption.”

Or parents who emotionally and physically disappeared long before they actually died; parents who orphaned you long before you actually became an orphan.

Boss believes [and I am paraphrasing for the purposes of this post] that these losses rather than being tied to a specific event frequently extend over many years, deepening in ways that grievers cannot register.

I am such a griever. My mother died in January 2018 and my father this past February. I never saw their bodies. They requested no funerals, obituaries or ceremonies of any kind. Are they really dead? Are they actually ghosts?

My loss is vague. I have no clear parameters. I am in a fog. Am I also a ghost? Do I really exist?

I ask these questions because this past week, I began to wonder if my lifelong frozen grief is impacting how I see and express myself. Over the decades when I’ve written stories about my life, the resounding and perpetual feedback from beloveds and fellow writers has been: “Where are you in this story?” “I don’t hear your voice.”

Over the past six months, I’ve been working on a writing project that features six characters — all of whom represent me during different decades of my life. The project, in a word, has been harrowing. Why has it been — and always been — so agonizing to sustain my voice no matter how old I am? Why does writing always feel like trying to connect evanescent dots? Why does expressing myself more often than not portend dread? Why does putting words on a page painfully expose so much emotional murkiness? Has ambiguous loss obscured my origins and parameters?

Boss believes that a “loss’s immeasurability doesn’t negate its existence — or its crippling effects . . . A phenomenon can exist even if it cannot be measured.” To move forward, Boss also believes the traditional five stages of grief do not assist in overcoming loss that has no authoritative certainty. Instead, she proposes “six nonsequential guidelines”:

• Making meaning out of loss
• Relinquishing one’s desire to control an uncontrollable situation
• Recreating identity after loss
• Becoming accustomed to ambivalent feelings
• Redefining one’s relationship with whatever or whomever they’ve lost
• Finding new hope

The struggle for clarity will continue as I attempt to wrestle with and respond to these guidelines. What meaning can be found in losing parents who lost you years ago? How does one relinquish control in the shadow of a mother who controlled everything? Who am I now? Will my ambivalent feelings ever bring peace? How will I redefine a relationship with parents I never knew and who never knew me? How will I find new hope?

Perhaps writing this post is a start.