Grief & Bereavement

Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief

It is the life of paradoxes that craves to lead a happy , blissful and satiated life , yet to many the mere happiness become a far off thing not to be heard neither to be felt . They find themselves engrossed in the web of grief that becomes most difficult to break and grueling task to resolve , and when the loss is ambiguous , it 's very difficult to bear Ambiguous loss takes away the soul from the bearer leaving him with emptiness , devoid of any sense of being and

belongingness to this world It is a condition suffered by the people whose near and dear ones are lost , or they are unaware of the situation in which their near and dear ones must be involved into . It is a very perplexing state when a person is physically present but at one stance not there either (Ashbourne Baker , Male , 2002

Pauline Boss , a psychotherapist and professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota , first propounded the word Ambiguous loss in her enduring work , Ambiguous Loss : Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief ' to find out the psychological and emotional crises the people are undergoing when the whereabouts about their near and dear ones are unknown , how they cope up with this situation and what they can do to come out of the crises and join once again in the main stream of the society . It 's a sense of frozen grief which takes into grip the people whose near and dear ones are lost in the wilderness of this world either in War , divorce , abduction or dissertation . When any one close to your heart dies , it is also a matter of grief but at-least a person can reconcile to his or her life because he or she cannot do anything but when the whereabouts of someone is unknown , that period is most difficult to bear . Boss capture these intense and emotional movements of the people and how they are coping with their lives in this enduring work of hers . In a very clear and simple language , she pleads for inner strength and self-endurance

Boss also appropriately pinpointed or may be exaggerating when she said that those persons who are facing ambiguous loss are those who get addicted to alcoholics . She put a strong point and evidence of her own relatives who had to leave their family in Switzerland to move on to Wisconsin in the early years of 1900 but could not return to Europe as the war had taken into its jaws the lives of the millions . Her grand mother was desperate to meet her son in America who could not meet her but was always sending letters to her that started with My dears ' and ended with May God protect you always . Mother ' When she stopped getting mails frequently owing to World War II , she wrote the most loving letter to the kin of the grandsons , to whom she could not meet during her...