Ambiguous Loss

June 3, 2007

Rev. Paul Beckel

First Universalist Unitarian Church ~ www.uuwausau.org

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who was not there.

He was not there again today.

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

English Nursery Rhyme

Plan but don’t plan as if it will all happen as you planned it.  Expect nothing and live frugally on surprise.

Alice Walker

I don’t want to gain immortality through my work.  I want to gain immortality by not dying.

Woody Allen

Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.

Carl Jung

What is healing, but a shift in perspective?

Mark Doty

INTRODUCTION

When we encounter losses in our lives -- even losses of deep significance -- we ordinarily have an opportunity to move through a period of grieving and emotional healing.  The grieving may be difficult, but it is intended to end.

But with certain kinds of losses the grieving never seems to end -- or perhaps it never even gets started -- when the relationship has changed, but is not completely over. When a parent has Alzheimer's disease; when we divorce; when a partner is over-committed to work; when we move far away from loved ones; when a soldier is missing in action; when a friend has a brain injury, or a mental illness; when a child has a progressive disability, or is given up for adoption. In these and many other situations we find ourselves confronted by the physical OR the psychological absence of a loved-one -- but not both.

Today we will explore the nature of Ambiguous Loss, and consider both theological implications and practical strategies which may enable us to move forward, even when reality seems hopelessly stuck.

GATHERING SONG            No Longer Forward nor Behind         #9

RESPONSIVE READING               Rainer Maria Rilke (German poet, 1875-1926)

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart—

Try to love the questions themselves—

Do not now seek the answers,

Which cannot be given because

You would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then

Gradually,

Without knowing it,

Live along some distant day

Into the answers.

MESSAGE Part I: The Reality of Ambiguous Loss

Today I would like to address the difficult reality of "ambiguous loss" -- a subject which probably touches every one of our lives in some way.  Even if you are not experiencing ambiguous loss directly, you are undoubtedly in a position to be supportive of someone who is.  And this is no easy task. Ambiguous loss occurs when an important person falls out of our lives...but not completely out.

When someone is physically present but emotionally absent, such as a sibling with dementia.  Or when someone is emotionally present, but physically absent, such as when I lost custody of my son Jonathan (then a toddler, turning 20 next week). 

Based on my own experience, I can certainly affirm the devastating effects of ambiguous loss.  Loss accompanied by little or no support for the process of grieving. Loss which largely goes un-named, and leaves us thinking that there is something wrong with us for feeling as badly as we do... for being emotionally stuck... for not being able to get on with our lives. 

I would like to say up-front that we will be wading into difficult emotional territory today. But I bring this to you confident that by naming and bringing to light those losses that appear to be un-resolvable... losses with no foreseeable end... that some healing can begin.

Please know that beyond raising these difficult issues, I will also offer some emotionally healthy ways to approach such losses, and some spiritual reflections about finding meaning in the midst of absurdity and the apparent unfairness of fate. And as always, I want you to know that I’m available to talk with you about any transitions in your life, even those that would seem to have been long long past.

***

In cases of ambiguous loss we have difficulty entering and following-through a healthy grieving process for a number of reasons. First of all, it is hard to put a finger on just what we have lost and what we haven't lost.  One out of three American families is touched by Alzheimer's disease. And yet when a partner is afflicted, who can accurately describe the reality with which we are confronted? For there are two (simultaneously contradictory) realities: I'm still married; but the one I love is gone.

But if it is hard to recognize for ourselves the nature of our loss, it is even harder to describe that reality -- and the depth of our loss -- to others. There are few rituals to publicly or even privately acknowledge an ambiguous loss.  And even when one has the courage to make a decisive move, and make such an acknowledgement (for example to have a funeral for a missing child) other family members will hold different perspectives, different expectations ... and needs.  Family conflict is almost inevitable. 

Sustaining ourselves through life's trials is a matter of hope.  To seek closure on an ambiguous loss can seem like giving-up hope.  So when one family member elects to pursue the necessary process of letting-go, another family member will interpret this as giving-up.  What if both are right?

The main reason that ambiguous loss resists concrete solutions is that, by nature, it continues.  Sometimes for years, or even for a lifetime.  Closure appears impossible when major elements of the story remain untold.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, ambiguous loss can diminish our effectiveness in our day-to-day lives.  It will certainly inhibit our search for inner peace...and may precipitate a spiritual crisis. The stress may cause somatic symptoms -- such as headaches, back pain, and sleeplessness. It may inhibit our growth in relationships, in spirit, in our ongoing quest for learning.  Unresolved grief in one part of our life may keep us from taking action in other areas.

We come together on Sunday mornings in order to reflect upon and to know gratitude for the lives we have. But the courage for reflection, and the reasons to be grateful are not always easy to find. As we enter into a time of shared silence now I would encourage you to identify the changes that you seek in your life today.  And I would encourage you to believe that -- even in those situations in which you feel stuck -- change is possible.  I invite you to draw strength now from the collective consciousness in a room filled with rich life experience, courage, and good will.

SILENCE (3:00)

Part II: Broadening our Perspectives

I could not have spoken about this theme a few years ago. Though the loss of custody of my son Jonathan occurred over 15 years ago, the pain is still sometimes sharp and has been, at times, overwhelming.  And though I may have been able to relate to people better for having had this experience, I often felt there was little that I could say to anyone that could ever make a difference.

Then I came across a review for a book called Ambiguous Loss, by Pauline Boss.  Until then I had never even heard this term.  But the moment I heard the term I began to understand better what had been plaguing me.  Just that phrase, just being able to name it, has been of tremendous help to me.  It has also helped to know that what I have experienced is not unique.

I would encourage you to name your ambiguous losses.  For in doing so it has begun to dawn on me that my distress is not just the result of my inability to cope, but the result of a situation which is beyond my control. Strip away the haunting questions of what I did to deserve it, or what I should have done to prevent it, the nature of the situation itself is inherently resistant to coping.

We know that those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder can become immobilized by flashbacks upon their trauma.  But with ambiguous loss, the trauma is not past -- it is current.

I have been fortunate to develop new relationships as I have moved through these years, but in many ways my grief over the past has remained frozen.  In fact there were times that I swore that I did not even want to get better.

For a long time I felt guilty whenever I acknowledged that any part of Jonathan was out of my life. And finding any kind of joy in life, seemed like a betrayal.  A wonderfully poignant novel by Wisconsin author Jacqueline Mitchard illustrates this.  The Deep End of the Ocean is about a child’s abduction, and his mother’s downward spiral into a zombie-like existence.  The mother, Beth, refuses to take pleasure in her new life without her son.  As she puts it: "Any solace at all would be a signal to the universe that a mother could get along with one child more or less."

***

It is risky to compare the severity of one persons’ suffering to that of another.  But still I would point to a tendency related to ambiguous loss: that the greater the ambiguity of a situation, the greater the resulting depression, anxiety, and family conflict.

We encounter ambiguous losses at many levels -- from the catastrophic results of war and especially undeclared wars during which those who disappear leave no death certificate, no body, and no funeral.

There are also the increasingly common diseases of old age, such as strokes, which no longer kill us but lead us to begin grieving – at least privately – long before the funeral.  And now we are even extending the dying process for our pets.

We have complicated situations brought on by reproductive technologies, and adoption, where a child, or at least some frozen sperm or eggs, may pass from one family to another against everybody’s wishes.

Improved telecommunications have enabled us to bring our offices into our homes and even on vacation, leaving much gray area: “Is he with us now, or is he at work?”

We face relationship changes -- such as affairs. Or what may seem just as bad: immersion into work, hobbies, sports, alcohol, drug and other addictions... in such a way as to be perpetually emotionally absent from the family, even when we may be physically present.

And what about something as common as co-workers being fired, or something as simple as sterilization or vasectomy? (You know: it's there, but it's not all there!)

We face the commonplace occurrences of children growing-up and going-off to make their way in the world... and parents becoming absent-minded. Cases in which changes occur over time so that while we quietly recognize that something is different, we deny that it involves any kind of loss.

And we’re reluctant to call it a loss when it seems like progress: divorce is often an improvement; leaving for college an achievement; finding a new religious home a blessing.  But each of these situations contain losses nonetheless.

Ambiguous loss is especially difficult to face for those of us who take a very rationalistic approach to life –- because we generally can make no sense out of them.

We cannot problem-solve because we can't determine if a problem is permanent or temporary.

I find this point particularly interesting because I know that 15 years ago I had a strong tendency to take the problem-solver approach to just about everything.  Since that time I have learned that this is fairly common among American males, and I know that I have expanded my modes-of-being beyond problem-solving.  I think this has played a part, over time, in my healing.

But rather than healing by seeking alternatives, it is more common that we turn to absolutes: acting as if a person is completely gone, or at the other extreme: denying that anything has changed.  Neither of these approaches works because we don't reorganize the roles and rules of our relationships to adapt to the reality which is truly, undeniably, ambiguous.

As a result, our other relationships suffer.  They can freeze in place as well; and where there would ordinarily be growth and adjustment in our other relationships, over time, even those may become stuck. 

For example, for a long time I attributed the weak relationships that I have with my siblings and parents to be a matter of stark political and religious differences.  But this insight about emotional stuck-ness has led me to wonder: Maybe at age 25 those relationships were strained, but under ordinary conditions they would have grown.

I have grown in a lot of other relationships in the last 15 years, but exclusively with people who I have met since my divorce.  I'm struck by the fact that -- while I have many apparently healthy relationships today -- I have cut off most of the  relationships that I had before that time.

And if I allow myself to think about it, I must confess that while our political and religious differences may be a superficial source of aggravation, the most difficult time that I have talking with my family-of-origin is when they ask about Jonathan.

Thus a common pattern emerges in cases of ambiguous loss: a spiral of withdrawal and withdrawal which ripples out to affect our other relationships.

If we lose someone we love, it is natural to temporarily withdraw, to protect ourselves, to find a place to express -- and recover from -- our pain.  But in the face of ambiguous loss our withdrawal may not be temporary.  And if we begin to ask why this has happened, why we are suffering, “When will I find closure?” ... and the myriad other questions which have no clear answers ... it is far too easy to spiral downward into an exhausting sense of helplessness and hopelessness.  Caught within that depressive cycle, then, we can become withdrawn, and emotionally unavailable, even to other loved ones who would wish to support us in our crisis.

Or, “anticipating a loss, we [may] both cling to a loved-one and push them away.  We [may] resist their leaving and at the same time want to be finished with the goodbye.”  Boss offers the example of fighter pilots during the war in Vietnam.  When they were given a week of rest and relaxation with their spouses in Hawaii, the week would often end with a fight or emotional withdrawal.  Don’t we do the same things when we end a family holiday weekend with an argument, just to make the transition a little easier?

***

I’ve described an awful set of symptoms common to ambiguous losses of many kinds.  I would also like to offer some solutions.

Over the years, it would not be unusual for a number of ambiguous losses to pile up within our lives.  They are, after all, seemingly un-resolvable, and therefore prone to stay with us.

Knowing this, it would be valuable first to identify as many of the losses as we can.  Tell your story, or at least write it out so that you can distinguish what is lost from that which remains. 

Gather all the information that you can.  There is some closure that can result from knowing that you’ve done everything you can, even if the only thing you can do is to gather information.

Once we can say which elements are irretrievably lost, it is important that we mourn these losses.  Create rituals for yourself or your family that will enable you to move beyond what you had. 

(Know that it is a part of my role to assist you with such rituals, and I would be happy to have you call on me even many years into the process of your letting-go.  The right time to mark a life transition is not determined by clock or calendar -- and it is not unusual at all to have a loss that has been unresolved for decades suddenly triggered by a seemingly unrelated event.  Holiday gatherings -- where we are directly faced with previously unacknowledged absences or presences -- are especially common triggers.)

Once you have mourned what you have clearly lost, celebrate that part of your loved one that remains....  Try to improve what can be improved....  And try to begin accepting the ambiguity of the rest of the story.

Family meetings with extended family can be helpful.  It is important to talk about the situation and to acknowledge the diversity of interpretations that different family members will hold.  Tell stories, look at old photos, laugh and cry together. 

Instead of throwing out the family traditions that bring you face to face with semi-present family members, adapt the traditions to accommodate the changing realities.

Know that you won't all see eye-to-eye, but validate one another anyway.  You may all be right. 

Acknowledge that confusion and mixed-feelings are normal given the situation.  Don't expect to come to an agreement...but keep talking.  Resist the isolation that results from our inability to compromise with others’ points of view.

Children should also be part of family meetings. But also let children draw and redraw pictures of their families.  Let their pictures change from day to day. Tell them that there is no right way to draw it, but that it should come out of their hearts.  Tell them explicitly that they should not only include their household.  Don't pass on to them the myth that a person's absence or presence is the only thing that determines whether they are part of your family.

***

Allow your perception of loved ones to change as you and they develop. Constantly re-define your relationship.  The loss of a child going to college will be more severe if you still think of her as a toddler. 

As much as possible, recognize that your loss may be a part of the natural cycle of life, even if it appears to be drawn out unbearably.

This may be easier in some cases, such as dealing with a disease that slowly takes the life of an older person.  But it is certainly more difficult when nature itself is a part of the problem. Here are a couple of situations which exhibit the gruesome power of nature to befuddle our human needs for closure:

In one case in Georgia, a teenager was swept into the rapids of a raging river and her body was trapped in a cavern beneath the stones.  Rescue workers gave up hope that they would ever be able to get to the body, but the girl’s father pushed for a major engineering feat to divert the river -–  risking more lives in a spot that has claimed 35 in the last 29 years, and potentially destroying a portion of a river protected by the National Wild and Scenic rivers Act.

The other case happened a few years ago in suburban Cleveland where my family and I were living at the time.  In a big storm, a branch fell and killed a homeowner and two friends.  Later that week the homeowner’s wife had the huge, healthy, 90-year-old tree cut down.

My initial reaction to both of these cases was harsh and uncharitable.  I wished that the survivors would just get over it, and not take their grief out on nature.  Before long I realized that of course I could not know what it would be like to be in these families’ shoes.  But still I affirm that the flow of nature contains a wisdom that we’d do better not to deny.

And so: use denial with care.

It can be a helpful coping mechanism.  Sometimes it's better to ignore the truth or the odds and fight on to retrieve something that may not be lost forever.

But denial can also be harmful when it renders us powerless to adapt, or to envision creative options for the future.

***

For ultimately, we must often accept the ambiguity.  As you watch a friend in the midst of an ambiguous loss, it may be tempting to judge their behavior as indecisive.  Know that she too may be damning herself for her inability to just make a choice -- to fight valiantly to save a dying relationship; or to move-on. 

As a very choice-conscious society, we expect ourselves and each other to appreciate choices and to make choices decisively.  But when we do so in the face of ambiguous loss every choice is false and potentially destructive.  Every decisive choice to regard our loved one as fully-here or fully-gone is a case of denial of the truth that they are both, and they are neither.

Finally, find humor wherever you can.  Joke about your difficulty dealing with the absurdity of your situation.  Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself.  I have a cartoon book written by a cancer survivor called, Not now...I'm Having a No Hair Day. One of the cartoons shows a woman at a party declining someone's offered cigarette.  "Gee no thanks," she says with a smile, "I already have cancer."

Pauline Boss reports on a family coping with their mothers’ Alzheimer’s by recording as poetry, some of the things she says:

“Where’s Dad?” she asks.

“He died about 5 years ago,” her son replies.

“Oh, he didn’t continue?”

And later: “I’m glad that we met Dad before he died.”

Boss comments: “I thought of all the parties I’d gone to where the conversation was just as nonsensical and no one [had] Alzheimer’s.”

MUSICAL MEDITATION

Part III: Spiritual Reflections

Rabbi Harold Kushner speaks of the apparent absurdity of fate in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner believes in a loving God, but he refutes the idea that the unfolding of time is all part of a beneficent plan. And he does not believe that everything that happens is the result of a complex system of cosmic justice, where we get what we deserve in life.

When confronted with losses it may be natural to ask, "Why did this happen to me?" "What did I do to deserve it?"  But ultimately, says Kushner, these questions remain unanswerable, and pointless.  The only meaningful question is this: "Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?"

He offers an example of Martin Gray, a survivor of the Holocaust, who after the war "rebuilt his life, became successful, married, and raised a family.... Then one day, his wife and children were killed when a forest fire ravaged their home....  Gray was distraught, pushed almost to the breaking point by this added tragedy.  People urged him to demand an inquiry into what caused the fire, but instead he chose to put his resources into a movement to protect nature from future fires.  He explained that an inquiry, an investigation, would focus only on the past, on issues of pain and sorrow and blame.  He wanted to focus on the future."

In the face of any loss we would do well to find meaning in it.  This is particularly hard to do in the face of ambiguous loss.  But if only in a limited fashion, it can be done.  We can act to transform and bring just a little more justice and predictability to the chaos.  And in our acts, we can find some healing.

I know that as a result of the loss of custody of Jonathan, I have become more sensitive to the pain and loss of others who experience not only identical losses, but loss in general.  I am not spiritually mature enough to say that its all been worth it. 

Kushner, who lost a son to a progressive childhood illness, writes, "I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of [my experience], and be what I was 15 years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy.  But I cannot choose.”

Similarly, in The Deep End of the Ocean, Beth, the mother of the abducted child, is confronted by a loving friend who reminds her that it is not helping anything to zone out, to withdraw from the world, and to stop mothering her other children.  "It's not a trade, Beth.  I've told you this.  If you give everything else up, it doesn't mean that you get Ben.  If that was the way it worked, I'd tell you to do it."

Ambiguous loss confronts us with our utter helplessness –- not just the perception of helplessness, but real helplessness.  It waves in our faces the reality that we are unable to choose our circumstances.  But even in the face of this we have the opportunity to respond.  How can we find the strength to do so?  How can we respond in love and acceptance?

If it is any comfort to know, Kushner suggests that even God is more or less helpless.  God did not sit idly by and watch the horrors of the Holocaust or even our day-to-day cruelties because God has an exalted scheme to carry out, nor because God takes a long-view on justice.  Rather, God is limited -- by the realities of natural law and human free will.  The power of God, as Kushner sees it, is not in the making things happen, but in the being with us through it all.

Whatever our views of God, we can appreciate Kushner’s sentiment that falling branches and raging rivers are not acts of God -- but the human responses to these conditions can be acts of God.

If we can forgive god this helplessness, if we can forgive reality it's apparent ruthlessness, we may be able to begin to move through our ambiguous losses.  In a perfect world, we might imagine that even our losses would be bearable because we could gracefully move through them to find closure and new beginnings.

But this is not a perfect world, and the conditions of our lives that we are called to accept are neither rational, predictable, nor fair.  Still, in the unfolding of time (two steps forward, one step back), we have the option of responding to the imperfections of life, to the imperfections of each other, with genuine love.  Not the love that admires perfection and closure, but the love of an imperfect god, an imperfect reality, our imperfect selves, because this love and acceptance makes us stronger.

The universe unfolds so slowly, it seems, that our losses may stretch beyond the bounds with which we could ordinarily cope.  Moving through ambiguous loss may be a matter of forgiving the universe for unfolding so slowly, rather than all at once.  Our task may be to respond by acknowledging what has past, accepting what we cannot change, and freely loving - for no good reason -- the imperfections that remain.

SENDING SONG      Just as Long as I Have Breath               #6    

BENEDICTION

These words are from an Anishabe prayer: "I step into the day; I step into myself; I step into the mystery." 

To be of use

Marge Piercy

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who stand in the line and haul in their places,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

   The seven of pentacles

Marge Piercy

Under a sky the color of pea soup

she is looking at her work growing away there

actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans

as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.

If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,

if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,

if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,

if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,

then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.

Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.

Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.

Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.

Live a life you can endure:  make love that is loving.

Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,

a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us

interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:

reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.

This is how we are going to live for a long time:  not always,

for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting.

after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.