Are you done crying yet?

Ambiguous loss: a different perspective on grief?

Mar 17, 2024

It took me years to get over my first breakup. Like, actual years.

The thing I remember the most vividly was all the crying. In the shower, at my desk, on buses, on tubes, in bed, in the club, doing the food shop, in downward dog—there was basically nowhere I wouldn’t start bawling.

Before then, I didn’t know it was humanly possible to cry that much. The kind of crying that puffs up your eyes and dries your mouth and makes you feel very sorry for yourself indeed.

Despite the countless odes I’d grown up with—songs, movies, poems, novels, TV shows, magazine columns—nothing prepared me for the resounding thwack of heartbreak, and the reverberations I’d feel for years to come.

What absolutely baffled me was that people were going through or had been through it, yet here they were, walking and talking like normal, functioning members of society (not weeping into the bathmat like I was).

How did anyone manage to survive it? How could they get any work done with all those what ifs and should haves cycling through their minds? How did they simply say “fine” when people asked how they were? Maybe they were just stronger and more resilient than me. Maybe they just hadn’t loved as hard as me.

Woe is me?

Self-pity and egocentricity aside, it felt like there was no place for my heartbreak. Like it wasn’t acceptable, or appropriate, or adult. Although I had many loving friends and family who let me cry to them/on them, over time it became something I felt like I had to hide.

Almost ten years on, and many more losses later, I’ve realised that the problem wasn’t necessarily me (although I did have some emotional maturing to do). It was a culture that’s crap at handling loss and grief. That tells us we need to keep it together/man up/get over it/move on. That shames us for our pain and denies our sadness.

This truth really hit home when in March 2020, my dad died suddenly from COVID.

Why are we so bad at dealing with grief?

In many ways, being able to process my grief in lockdown was probably healthier than it would have been in “normal” times. I was cocooned from the outside world. And shut up inside, watching the numbers rise, everyone else was forced to confront death head on.

But still, I was exposed to everything I’d heard about our cultural awkwardness around bereavement (which I myself had probably been guilty of). The stilted condolences. The formality of funerals. The coldness of paperwork. The expiry date on asking how you are or remembering anniversaries.

It’s easy to blame other people for these missteps and oversights, taking out our anger out on friends who forget or feel too embarrassed to ask about our grief. I will forever appreciate those who do, but I don’t begrudge those who don’t. Until it’s happened to you, and you join the metaphorical club, you can’t really understand what it’s like. Neither are we given the tools to talk about these things in “polite” society.

I’d been prepared for this by my formative experiences with heartbreak. I already understood that our reluctance to talk about the pain of loss reaches far wider than an actual death. The irony is that all of us are carrying around some form of grief or sadness, regardless of whether we’ve been affected by a death.

There are many forms of loss. But because they’re not as clear-cut, final or physical as death (for which we at least have ceremonies and platitudes), they go unspoken, unacknowledged and untended.

Frozen grief: love with nowhere to go

I used to feel like part of the reason I struggled to “move on” from my first breakup was that it was still a fledgling relationship, so at the time of the breakup I’d only very recently fallen in love. This made it harder, in the sense that society values relationships by the amount of time you’ve been together, not the intensity of feeling.

But it was also as if the love had been frozen in time, and then it had nowhere to go. Now I have the language and the resources to talk about grief, this is one of my favourite ways to describe it: grief is love with nowhere to go.

Recently, I stumbled across the term “frozen grief” when reading about the concept of ambiguous loss. It struck a chord, and I think it’s a useful lens through which to understand our relationships to loss, endings, mourning and sadness.

What is ambiguous loss?

Ambiguous loss is when you experience a loss without closure or a clear conclusion.

It can happen in the context of a bereavement. For example, when someone goes missing and is presumed dead, but no body is recovered. But it can also apply to losses that aren’t “deaths” (at least in how we commonly interpret that word).

According to the psychology textbooks, examples of this second type of ambiguous loss—which is defined by “psychological absence” (type one is “physical absence”)—include:

Losing a baby to miscarriage
A parent being absent due to addiction
Being adopted or in foster care
Watching a loved one face dementia

All of these situations can be tragic. They are things that take a lot of time, love and healing to live with.

But I think it’s also important to explore how we might apply the concept of ambiguous loss to events and experiences that aren’t culturally deemed “tragic”: setbacks in our careers, a creative dream that failed, a breakup. In therapeutic terms, this might be described as the difference between capital “T” Trauma and lower case “t” traumas.

And although the smaller t's may not be perceived as having the same magnitude or gravity, they can hit us hard. They also need attention if we are to heal from them, or at least learn to live with them.

How to resolve the unresolved

Part of the problem is that we don’t have the language, systems and support to navigate these “lesser” losses. So how do we begin to process and express them? Can we ever resolve them?

It’s something I’ve been grappling with, personally, as I can spot the different ways ambiguous loss has manifested in my own life: all the breakups I went through and never fully understood, jobs that ended dramatically and chaotically, friendships that waned, creative dreams I left behind.

I think one of the greatest forms of ambiguous loss, for me, was the grief of being single (something I spoke about in my last post); having to live without something or someone I desperately wanted. Having so much love to give and no one to receive it—again, love with nowhere to go.

Now, I’m in a pretty good place in life—lovely relationship, rewarding career, great friends and family, health, safety, peace and security. But I’m repeatedly surprised when something bubbles up from beneath the surface, spilling over as anything from envy, to self-criticism, to anger (all clues to deeper wants and needs).

Acting like it never happened

It’s really hard to name these ambiguous losses. We can feel embarrassed or confused, and so we mask our feelings of sadness with jokes, self-deprecation, stoicism or cynicism.

Perhaps the biggest example of all is the pandemic. Something every single one of us has experienced, and yet we don’t seem to want to face up to.

Of course, there are people like me who went through type one ambiguous loss as a result of COVID: losing a loved one and not being able to physically be by their sides in the hospital. I still feel the shock of that. The disbelief.

But there’s also type two: the years of our lives we lost and will never get back. The jobs, the education, the partying. The versions of ourselves that we lost.

Lockdown lifted, but we returned to normality (with good reason) tentatively. There was no closing/opening ceremony, no V-day, no street parties. Before we knew it, we were thrust back into morning commutes, packed gyms, packed social calendars.

I speak to people all the time who are still struggling in the aftermath of the pandemic. Younger people who missed out on what was meant to be the best years of their lives. People my age who’d rather converse with their houseplants than make small talk at house parties. Older people who continue to feel anxious about germs, illness and crowded spaces.

What have we done, individually and collectively, to acknowledge this loss? To process our grief, to heal ourselves, to begin again—not by just pretending it never happened, but by growing from all the deeper knowing we have gained?

There is no moving on, only living with

It’s much written and talked about, but the main thing I’ve learned about grief is that there is no “moving on”. Only living with. This can be harder to do when loss feels ambiguous or unresolved; unchecked, it can eat away at us.

My dad (an incredibly wise man) always used to tell me to think of my emotions like a pond. Some stuff lies deep at the bottom, buried in the silt and sludge. Other stuff is closer to the surface. But if life throws something in the pond, those ripples can dredge up what’s hidden.

What this metaphor tells us is that some feelings never really go; they’re just waiting in the wings. It doesn’t mean that we need to be stagnant, live in the past or wallow in our feelings, but they do need tending to.

Grief is one of these emotions that can lie dormant, buried under the more superficial emotions of everyday life. I’m still working out how to tend to mine, in all its resolved and unresolved manifestations, so that it doesn’t hit me when I least expect it.

I feel like I have such a long way to go with this journey. And culturally, where do we even begin?!

But there are some things I believe can help:

Identifying ambiguous loss
What grief are you carrying? What endings have you experienced? Which unresolved situations are nagging away at you? I see so many people experiencing what could be ambiguous loss: moving to a different country, moving to a new workplace, changing careers, or mourning an old relationship as a new one begins.
Talking about it
The more we give voice to our emotions, the less shame we carry. Of course, talking to a professional can be really powerful. But to really break down the walls, we also need to be open with each other, creating safe environments by asking the questions we often feel shy to.
I’ve observed through coaching and being coached that one of the most powerful questions can be a simple “What else?”: What else do you feel? What else makes this important? What else needs to be said?
Finding ways to mark endings and beginnings
When I’m working with coaching clients, and in my own life, I try to make space for endings and beginnings. We move through life quickly, always anticipating the next thing. But even at the beginning of happy, exciting, positive new adventures, we are leaving something behind.
How can we make our own rituals for these transitions, new outlets for our grief? Maybe it’s writing for catharsis, maybe it’s throwing a massive party, maybe it’s starting a secret circle, maybe it’s burning shit (photos, your ex’s clothes, sage).

What do you think?

In the spirit of talking, and normalising these emotions and experiences that are so deeply human, I’d love to hear from you. Grief is so universal, but also so specific; how does the concept of ambiguous loss resonate with you? And individually and collectively, what are your ideas for how we can give voice to our grief?

Comment below if you feel comfortable, or feel free to message my privately. My inbox is always open via email (luciafontaina@gmail.com), LinkedIn or Instagram.