When someone we love dies, we have a funeral. The loss is clear and clean—while the relationship might have been complex, the loss of the person is not. We will never see, hear, or speak with them again. But when someone we love has dementia, succumbs to addiction or mental illness, ghosts us, disappears, or cuts off contact with us, we lose the person and relationship in a way that doesn’t allow for the same kind of closure. This kind of loss is called “ambiguous loss.”

Pauline Boss, PhD, who coined the term “ambiguous loss,” is clear that this kind of loss is no less devastating than other losses. She states that “human relationships are often traumatized by ambiguous loss,” but that it’s often overlooked by therapists as well as our society as a whole.

In her work, Boss defines two types of ambiguous loss:

Ambiguous loss........

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