Introduction

This is a sensitive topic so if you’re not in the headspace to discuss negative, challenging emotions, maybe skip this one for now. In this post, I wanted to reflect on the subject of grief following an ambiguous loss.

I decided to write about this subject after recalling discussing it with my therapist during our sessions in the past. I remember talking about how I was confused that I seemed to grieve people and things, even when no lives were lost. To me, it just didn’t make sense. Given this, I began Googling versions of ‘grieving someone who isn’t dead’ and learned of the subject of ambiguous loss which seemed to describe my feelings perfectly. I wanted to share this discussion in case it helps someone else who may have felt (or are currently feeling) similar to where I found myself.

What Is Ambiguous Loss?

Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Dr Pauline Boss in the 1970s. It can be defined in either the physical sense or the psychological. In the physical sense, examples include someone going missing or being lost at war and they/their body was never found. Complicated relationship breakups could also fall under this category. Essentially, it’s when someone is physically no longer in your life, but the circumstances are unclear surrounding it.

Psychological ambiguous loss examples could be experiencing the process of a loved one’s decline due to a cognitive illness. It also could also include more subtle things like losing your sense of self after a significant life event and therefore grieving the former version of yourself.

By writing about this subject, I want to be clear that grief as an entire experience is not a competition. Whether you or someone you know has or is experiencing grief because of the literal death of a loved one or whether it is something more complex, everyone’s experiences are valid. The stories and examples I share here are in no way intended to present myself as someone who’s experienced the ‘worst’ time compared to another person. Comparison doesn’t exist in the space in which grief lives.

My Story

I’m going to try to keep this as vague as I can, without losing detail, to protect the person’s privacy and respect their decision to no longer associate with me. In other words, if you’re reading this and have any kind of idea of who I’m referring to, please do not comment, tag or send this on. It may not be the person you’re thinking of.

When I was around 21, I lost someone from my life. They didn’t pass away but simply walked out of my life, as quickly as they came into it many years prior. The day they left, they did it with a short, sharp sting. There was no real fight or disagreement, it was simply a case that they chose to tell me, in a less-than-friendly way, that they no longer wanted contact with me. At the exact moment of it happening, I didn’t feel its burn. It was only later that I began to acknowledge the hole that had formed in my life.

This person was someone I felt I’d grown up with and, due to that, I felt an inconceivable amount of loss. Not only had I lost someone I viewed as a very close friend, but I’d also lost someone who shaped aspects of who I was. I’d also felt betrayed because I’d believed everything was relatively ok between us yet they dropped the bombshell of telling me they never wanted to speak to me again.

A few weeks out, I remember all the emotions hitting me at once one night. It was at a time when I thought I was moving past what had happened but, in the silence of the early hours, it all came flooding back. All I wanted was to speak to the person, one last time. I wanted to ask them what made them say what they did and why they felt they had to cut all contact with me. But I couldn’t. As part of the whole situation, they chose to block/remove me from everything and, even if that wasn’t the case, I know that it wouldn’t have been right to disrespect their decision to leave me in their past.

By the time a few months had passed by, a new emotion had made its home within me – anger. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wish they knew what hurt they’d caused me. I wished I’d never met them in the first place. I wished they would one day understand that they should never have done the things they did to me. In short -and I’m ashamed to admit this-, I wanted them to experience something like the pain I’d gone through in losing them. Looking back, I know I don’t mean that as, out of principle, I don’t wish bad on others. But, during the loneliest times where all I felt was the visceral sensation of being ripped away from a life I thought I knew with someone, it was all my mind could cling to.

Over the next few years, I went back and forth between anger and just plain missing them until, one day, the hole in my life seemed far less vast. The void had slowly begun to fill itself in – with family, friends, new experiences, and new-found joys in life. It had happened slowly enough that I didn’t notice at first but the earliest symptom of it was feeling neutral at the mention of their name.

What I Learned

It Never Ends

Having ridden out this process, I’ve come to learn that often, there is no clear-cut ending to the grieving process. You don’t one day wake up not remembering anything about them, hence there always being something that has the potential to come up in everyday life that brings them to the front of your mind again. In situations like this, I feel it’s a case where I’ve developed a level of resilience to no longer feel weighed down by the past.

It’s Easy to Try to Blame Yourself for Everything

For me personally, the hardest part about ambiguous loss has always been the questions left behind. I’ll never really know why the person in my story decided that they wanted to cut all ties with me. Of course, I can guess, but that won’t help me as I move forward into the future. I’ll also never understand why they chose to do it in a hurtful manner.

Having talked it through with a therapist, her first response was ‘but it’s not your fault’. My initial reaction to this, without getting into it, was that there could be argument that I was at fault in some aspects of the circumstances. However, I genuinely believe that it isn’t helpful to beat yourself up over something that is long gone; therefore, my therapist’s sentiment is correct. Finding a way of forgiving yourself is a vital part of moving through the grieving process in my opinion.

It Doesn’t Benefit You to Remain Negative Forever

Further to my previous point, something I noticed, once many of my more difficult emotions had passed, was that it would be very easy to fall into a negative place when it comes to remembering the person in question. I’d catch myself bouncing between either blaming or over analysing aspects of myself for what had happened or questioning why the person had acted in the way that they did. It’s natural to feel a lot of things but for me, there came a time where it was important to acknowledge that carrying large amounts of negativity with me was no longer serving me or my future life goals.

I read an analogy once where someone linked carrying negative emotions to carrying around heavy luggage. I made the conscious decision to put the bags down and take the weight off.

There Are No Rules When It Comes to Grief

People always say that there’s no right way to grieve and, until I reflected on this topic, I never really thought much into it. Nevertheless, I believe they’re absolutely correct. I carried a decent amount of shame and guilt with me throughout this journey – I felt shameful that I was angry for so long, I felt guilt about the possibility that it could have been all my fault and I just wasn’t aware of it as well as a whole plethora of other internal, unhelpful dialogues. Despite living through this though, I genuinely believe I needed to feel this spectrum of emotion to be able to grow as a person and mature emotionally.

Conclusion

I appreciate that this wasn’t the most articulate of posts but, I still wanted to discuss it. Not all subjects have a pleasant intro-body-conclusion format as life itself isn’t that way either. By writing this, I hope to have shed some light on the subject of ambiguous loss – a term I never knew existed until I went searching.