I was steadying my nerves in the cold lobby of a hotel in Coquitlam, British Columbia—heart pulsing, playlist shuffling—summoning my alter ego to deliver a keynote address. That’s when a weathered gentleman approached me, eyes forlorn, voice ragged. He wistfully inquired about the event advertised on the banner beside me. I explained that it was a leadership development day for municipal leaders, then asked if he was attending. He glumly shook his head. “I’m searching for my son,” he muttered. “He came to B.C. a year ago, and I haven’t heard from him since.”
Just moments earlier, I had reached the edge of my warm-up ritual, head bobbing to a medley of vintage 50 Cent, buoyed by bravado, conjuring the confidence to perform. But the father’s haunting disclosure severed the bass and cast a deafening silence. I crashed.
My mind scattered through scenarios. Had his son died? Was he somewhere out there, unhoused, unwilling, unable to come home? Or had he chosen to vanish? The uncertainty unearthed a sorely unwanted feeling: the liminal ache of ambiguous loss—a grief that doesn’t come with answers, doesn’t fit neatly into categories, and doesn’t grant the peace of a clear ending.
A goodbye without punctuation.
Hearing my name emanating from the stage, I clumsily wished the stranger courage and stumbled back into the ballroom, all but composed.
This surreal encounter warped me into the void—into my own labyrinth of losses from the year before. None complete. None closed. Each of them still grasping through the veil.
Such is the cruel nature of ambiguous loss: it resists the comfort of temporality. As psychologist Stephen A. Hobfoll might frame it in his Conservation of Resources theory, it lives in all three tenses at once—past loss that hasn’t faded, present loss you can’t name, and future loss that feels inevitable.
It lingers like a ghost—not of someone or something gone, but maybe still here.
And naming it is the first step toward healing.
What Is Ambiguous Loss?
The term “ambiguous loss” was coined by family therapist and researcher Dr. Pauline Boss in the 1970s. She described it as a grief that defies certitude—disorienting, open-ended, unresolved. There are two principal forms:
- Physical Absence With Psychological Presence: A person vanishes, but your heart holds on. You wait. You wonder. You hope. Think: soldiers missing in action, displaced people, estranged family.
- Psychological Absence With Physical Presence: A body remains, but the soul feels distant. A parent with dementia. A partner consumed by addiction. Even yourself, after trauma.
Each form fractures the natural rhythm of grief. It leaves people stuck in a looping question: Am I allowed to move on if I don’t know what I’ve lost?
Why It Hurts So Deeply
How do you let go of what you can’t define?
Unlike traditional grief, ambiguous loss doesn’t offer closure—it offers confusion. It’s not a wound that scabs over; it’s one that keeps reopening, because you’re never quite sure if you should be healing or hoping.
Ambiguous loss also destabilizes identity. You’re not just grieving the loss—you’re grieving the version of you that existed in relation to the object(s) lost.
“Am I still a daughter if my mother doesn’t recognize me?”
“Am I still a husband if my partner disappeared without a trace?”
“Am I still a parent if I never see my child again?”
This is more than sorrow. It’s existential unraveling. The pain reaches beyond the heart into the realm of self. Grief unmoored from ritual becomes a silent, solitary struggle.
How To Live With It
Closure isn’t always possible. But meaning certainly is.
The best wisdom I’ve received came from my wife, Bailey Parnell, after we both endured the worst kind of ambiguous loss. Twice. “I am now someone who has lost children,” she told me. Not with bitterness. Not with resignation. But with quiet, courageous clarity.
Bailey had integrated the loss into her identity. And therein lies the secret: we don’t “get over” losses like these—we grow around them.
Grief doesn’t end. It evolves. And so must we.
Therapy for ambiguous loss focuses on precisely this: restoring identity, rebuilding resilience, and gently shifting the goal from closure to adaptation.
The world will change. The old reality will disappear. But your new one can still hold meaning, even joy. You may never get back what was lost. But you can still build a beautiful life around the absence.
With grace and resolve, reframe the question from “How do I find closure?” to “How do I keep living with dignity, courage, and love?”
What If I Can’t Accept It?
Most of us can’t—at least not at first. How do you accept what you can’t define? How do you carry a loss that refuses to be named?
But here’s what does help:
Integrating loss into identity.
Rebuilding resilience through connection.
Turning pain into presence.
Resilience is less about strength and more about support. It’s reaching out when you want to cave in. It’s learning to dance with the unknown. It’s choosing to make meaning even when the story remains unfinished.
Yes—your age, culture, and access to resources shape how easily you can do this. But no matter where you start, here’s the gentle truth: you don’t have to do it alone. Even sharing your struggle with a stranger can be part of the healing process.
The old man in the lobby? He may never get an answer. For all intents and purposes, he was searching for a ghost. I don’t know if he was grieving, delusional, hopeful, or all three. But I know this: he was still searching. Maybe not for his son. Maybe just a sliver of closure. And that, too, is resilience.
I didn’t see the man after the event. But I still carry his yearning.
Whether it’s a lost person, a lost dream, or a version of yourself you miss—name your ghost. And go from there.
Because even when closure isn’t possible, healing still is.
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