THE CURRENTS OF WATER AND LOSS

The warmth of the tropical ocean water and the waves hitting my shins brought me to a tranquil state I hadn’t felt for a while. As I walked the beach, the persistent feeling of loss I was carrying began to slowly shift. The salty ocean scent and the canopy of tropical rainforest above me loosened something I had been holding tight. Then, I stopped. Ahead of me stood a damaged retaining wall. This sturdy structure of cement blocks and wiring was ripped into pieces that the ocean had found its way through.  Witnessing this torn-apart structure within the serene landscape, I felt a connection between this vast water and the grief I had been carrying for many years. It was a recognition that water, like grief, will not be restrained; both will find their way through.

Water has a force that is invisible on the surface. It can disperse, heavily soak, or carve a new path into the hardest stone. The loss that I was working to release was the same. I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but I could feel the current in my body. It moved and caused constriction, it produced chronic tension, and I even had bouts of unexplained tears. “This grief is called ambiguous loss,” I could hear my therapist saying to me. “There are many levels to it, and you have had a bouquet of ambiguous losses handed to you all at once. Awareness is the first step in working with it, now let’s work slowly to disentangle it.”

Ambiguous loss is different from a traditional loss as there is no closure. It also involves situations where we have no control. Death is an ending our culture recognizes. The person who has passed away is acknowledged as not physically here, there is a death certificate, and in most cases a funeral to bring closure. In ambiguous loss, there is no finality and that is what is so confounding about it. When someone is alive but not with us because of dementia, addiction, or estrangement, there is no recognized ritual for that loss. No one brings flowers. Many times, no one sees how the small pieces of connection drift away. The grief has nowhere to go; it doesn’t leave. It seeps into our daily lives and can show up in our bodies like the ocean tides getting pulled in and pushed back with no clear beginning or end.

What makes this particularly isolating is that ambiguous loss is widely experienced yet rarely named. Pauline Boss, in her indispensable book Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, identifies two forms this loss can take. The first is when someone we love is physically absent but remains deeply present in our hearts and minds. This can be the family whose child has been abducted, the loved one who emigrated and left an entire life behind, the child placed for adoption who is somewhere, and always being wondered about, and the family structure that is changed when a child moves away from home for college or work. The second is possibly the more common one: when someone is physically here but psychologically unreachable. This is the loved one walking through dementia, the family member consumed by addiction, the spouse who disappeared into work years ago, or the friend who moved away and took the daily rhythm of connection with them. In both forms, the loss is real. It simply has no ceremony.

Just as water reshapes a shoreline by showing up, again and again, we can soften the pain of ambiguous loss the same way. We can’t resolve it, but we can return to it with gentleness. Here are a few practices from Boss, and from my own life, that have brought some ease.

Find meaning in this moment. When loss can't be resolved, it is helpful to stop reaching for what was and rest in what is. With dementia, this might mean releasing the person your loved one used to be and being fully present with who they are today. It is not a small thing. It is, in fact, an act of profound love.

Release the need to fix and control what has no ending. Ambiguous loss resists resolution by its very nature, and fighting that truth only creates exhaustion. There can be something quite freeing in simply acknowledging that this will not be resolved. When a relationship has been lost to psychological absence or divorce, the work becomes less about closing a chapter and more about learning who you are in this new and unsteady landscape. That rebuilding, slow as it is, becomes its own kind of stable ground.

Allow new hope to find you. Try not to force optimism but lean into honest openings. There are always small moments where the future feels less fixed. Reframing is not pretending. It is intentionally noticing where light is still getting through.

Ambiguous loss asks something difficult of us, not to find closure, but to make room. The more we name it, sit with it, and allow it space in our conversations, the less alone we are inside it. Ambiguous grief is not a problem to be solved. It is the proof of an attachment, of meaning, of a love that has nowhere to go and so it buoys with great faithfulness within us.

Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.