Pauline Boss, PhD: Why Closure is a Myth
Dr. Pauline Boss is an emeritus professor at University of Minnesota and world-renowned pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of family stress management. She’s also revered for her groundbreaking research on what is now known as the theory of ambiguous loss. Dr. Boss coined the term ambiguous loss in the 1970s to describe a very particular type of loss that defies resolution, blocks coping and meaning-making, and freezes the process of grieving. With death, she says, there is official certification of loss, proof of the transformation from life to death, and support for mourners through community rituals and gatherings. In ambiguous loss, none of these markers exist, the lingering murkiness leaving individuals unnerved and stressed out.
In her forty years of clinical experience as a family therapist, Dr. Boss has worked with individuals, couples and families dealing with some kind of ambiguous loss—from families in New York who lost family members during 9/11 and are experiencing the physical kind of ambiguous loss, to those dealing with the psychological ambiguous losses of a parent with Alzheimer’s disease, a loved one with an addiction, or someone who is changing as a result of aging or transitioning. Drawing on research and her immense cache of clinical experience, Dr. Boss has developed six guiding principles for building the resilience to both bear the trauma of ambiguous loss and to move forward and live well, despite experiencing a loss with no certainty or resolution.
She joins me to discuss this often unrecognized, but ubiquitous type of loss, particularly as it relates to closure, the subject of her most recent book, The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change. Our conversation touches on our collective grieving following the pandemic and our country’s awakening to the concept of systemic racism; how we can begin to increase our tolerance for ambiguity, and the importance of discovering new hope in the face of grief that has no end. Our search, she tells us, must not be for the elusive concept of closure, but rather for a sense of meaning and a new way to move forward.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Unnerving ambiguity…
Using both/and language around loss…
Pillars of processing…
Moving forward, not moving on…
MORE FROM PAULINE BOSS:
What if There’s No Such Thing as Closure? - NYT Magazine, December 2021
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I had heard of the term ambiguous loss, but I didn't know who coined it. So I was so happy to, I first saw the piece on you and The Times.
PAULINE BOSS:
Oh, I see. Meg Bernhard.
ELISE:
That was a wonderful piece.
PAULINE:
Bless her heart. She made it possible to sell out the first printing in two weeks.
ELISE:
I'm not surprised it was so such an incredible…so many people sent that to me. I feel like it's always a resonant topic, but not until you're in the situation, which I'm sure is not one of the frustrations of your life's work, but in a way, you're trying to prepare people for this inevitable reality of life, which is loss, and no one really grapples with it until it happens.
PAULINE:
And both kinds of loss. And most of the grief experts talk about types of grief, but nobody has talked about types of loss. And so I started doing that in the 1970s when I was working with the families of the soldiers missing an action in Southeast Asia, during the Vietnam war. And so those families had what I called an ambiguous loss. They didn't know if their loved one was dead or alive, and they had no facts concerning his whereabouts. It was all guys at that time. And so I came up with the term ambiguous loss in the early 1970s. And then, during the eighties, I studied families where someone had Alzheimer's disease and realized there were two types of ambiguous loss. The first type being physical, such as the soldiers missing an action and the second type being of families where someone has dementia, Alzheimer's or the other over 80 kinds of conditions or illnesses that cause dementia.
So it is very, very common these days. And so the person with dementia is physically there in front of you, but psychologically absent and frequently, as it goes on, may not even know who you are. So those two kinds of ambiguous loss, physical and psychological, are much more common than we think. And while the theory of ambiguous loss is quite inclusive, you can therefore plug in all kinds of different situations in human relationships that fit. The most recent research is being done with families of young people who are transitioning gender. The person who's the adult who's transitioning doesn't feel like they have a loss. In fact, they feel like they have a gain, but the families and friends who knew them in the previous gender, have asked to use the ambiguous loss framework or, or just use it. The researchers use the ambiguous loss framework to study the impact on the family and what they can do about it.
ELISE:
I think it's so, as you mentioned, it's inclusive, it feels like such an expansive framework, and I loved sort of how you opened The Myth of Closure with exactly that Anderson Cooper talking about how closure itself is a made up media word, and that no such thing really exists, but there are so many losses that people experience all the time miscarriage, addiction, and yeah, stillborn.
PAULINE:
Infertility as well, by the way, because you're expecting to have something happen and your body doesn't make it happen, or the circumstances don't make it happen. So you have an ambiguous loss there. There's research done on all three of those: stillborn, miscarriage, and infertility using the ambiguous loss framework. By the way, I don't do this research. I'm a theory builder and other people have carried on the research. I did the research in the 1970s and nineties, but now I'm 87-years-old and I pretty much mentor other people and enjoy a second and third generation doing the work.
ELISE:
But it's amazing just to even give people language. I mean, you hear that all the time when people, trying to think a good example, but sometimes someone will have an experience. And then when you can say, actually, there's a name for that. There's a category of that. Your experience is shared. It is a thing. That in of itself. feels like it must provide some relief.
PAULINE:
You're right on. And it comes out of the stress literature. You can't cope with something unless you have a name for what's wrong. So essentially, what I've done is given a name to something that has been just distressing people for eons. Nobody died. There's no death certificate. There's plenty of support for that. But here you have a condition where there's no greeting card, there are no rituals, there's nothing. And still you know, that you feel bad, you feel sad. You may even be grieving and not know it. Of course you would be, with somebody who has dementia, even if they're sitting right in front of you, or terminal illness. And if they're physically gone. So what, what this theory does is give it a name and therefore you can start coping with it. But importantly, not with a medical model, not with a medical approach, a mental illness approach.
I use a stress based approach. So you cope with something that is creating ambiguity, and the brain doesn't like ambiguity. We don't like ambiguity in our culture. We're not accustomed to it. Whereas some Eastern cultures might take it more easily. For example, Native Americans handle it more easily, too. But those of us who are more mastery oriented in the Western culture type of interaction, we like to be in charge of our own destiny. We don't like ambiguity. And during COVID, during the pandemic now with war in Eastern Europe. With climate change, with racial issues, with all the economic issues and disparities. We’re surrounded by ambiguity and uncertainty and it's unnerved us all. And so I think if we can put a name to what's bothering us, of course there are specifics, but one of the things we don't name is that the situation is ambiguous and therefore creates a great deal of uncertainty.
So how do we increase our level of tolerance for ambiguity? How do we increase our tolerance for ambiguity? It's not a popular thing in our culture. But the way we do it is to get to know people like ourselves people, you know, who are there, but instead we should go and talk to the people we don't know, get to know people from diverse cultures, travel to unknown places, learn something you never learned before, try something new, do something different. All of these things that when we're distressed, of course, we hunker down and we don't do most of those things.
ELISE:
Totally. No, I'm glad you brought up work. Cause I thought it was also really beautiful, particularly in Ambiguous Loss. When you write about your family and immigration, and that, I don't know if it's less acute now that we have modern means for connecting. I mean, the story about your dad, you having one phone conversation with your grandmother was so beautiful and touching, and obviously we live in a more connected world now. But as we watch what's happening, as you mentioned in Eastern Europe, we watch mass immigration happening all over the place as people are displaced by war and climate change. And it's interesting to give that that also fits within this framework.
PAULINE:
Because of the ambiguity and uncertainty. That's a major stressor for most of us, and yes, you're absolutely right. It's going on all over the world, with migrants and refugees and people who are ill, people who don't have the means to even have a telephone and broadband. And so there's still people that are disconnected from one another, sometimes for a lifetime.
ELISE:
It's interesting in the context of giving things language as well, because you know, at the beginning of The Myth of Closure, you talk about finding meaning and we'll get to that. I know it's part of your, and then I kept arguing you with you in my head because I was like, well, sometimes the pressure to find meaning of something that can feel very meaningless, it feels like negative tendency. And then you went right to there. Where some things are labeled “meaningless” and that also yes, addresses the ambiguity. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and how it's kind of an antidote?
PAULINE:
Yes. One of the examples I give in the book is that my little brother, and I was six-years-old when he was born, and because my mother had another baby 11 months after that, I was, essentially, a junior mother to him. So I was very close to him. He played junior high football one Friday night and died of ball bar polio the next Friday night. He had been at Boy Scout Camp and picked up the virus of polio. That was the summer before, that was in the 1950s, the summer before the Salk vaccine came out. So that situation taught me that some losses remain meaningless. That's meaningless to me, and families that have murders and suicides and so on also tell me that their losses are meaningless. There are many but meaninglessness is a meaning.
And what that means is it will never make sense, nor does it have to. But what you do then is find some purpose in that meaningless loss. The purpose will carry you forward. If you can't find a meaning in it. And for us after my little brother died of polio, my whole family went and helped with the March of Dimes effort, going door to door, collecting dimes or the research to provide a vaccine, which came the next year after my little brother died. So we always felt that we helped to prevent others from having a loss we have had. And you see that all the time in the papers and on TV where someone has a very meaningless loss, that's very difficult, but they still find some purpose in helping other families to avoid having the pain they had.
ELISE:
And you were writing, this is in The Myth of Closure. You wrote about Eddie, your brother, you said: “After Eddie's death, was I ever happy again? Yes. I have had a wonderful life. But the price we paid for loving others is the pain of loss and grief. It is also the price we paid for living a long life.” And I love that because I think having, you know, I think most people are touched by loss or if they haven't, they recognize they will be. But there's you talk a lot about both/and language, which I think is so important because it can feel irrevocable, unsurvivable, completely debilitating. And then there's often that lingering guilt, right. You know, of everything you've experienced in your life and wondering sort of pacing with Eddie, who didn't live. But I think it's so powerful and important when people provide that perspective. But it's a difficult one for people to reconcile: Joy in life, when someone they love lost their life.
PAULINE:
We're trained in this culture to think in binaries: You're either alive or you're dead. You either win or you lose, or you're either good or you're bad. And what I'm talking about is a more nuanced view of loss because it isn't that binary. So you lose someone, you both lose someone, and you remember them. You know, you both win and lose, you know what I mean? That's life. And so Eddie is gone, but in fact, his photo is right up above of my bookshelf right here, where I'm sitting. And I think of him periodically. And I think o in the book, I list my friends and, who were very dear to me. I just lost my husband, while I was writing the book. And so I had to set it a aside for a while. In fact, I had to set this book aside before because he became quite ill and I had to be a caregiver. So I actually started this book, I think in 2015. Well, it took a very different turn because of all that happened between then and now. And I had to put some personal anecdotes in it as well. It's almost what I call an academic memoir, more memoir than academic.
And, it seemed to me, honest at the time, because I was grieving as I wrote. And writing for me was a way to cope with it. Writing for me was in fact my purpose, on try in trying to make sense of not only my husband's loss, but all the others I had had, given my age.
ELISE:
You have that amazing quote. I think it's Carl Whitaker about how we can't really make sense of anything until we're past it or have seen the whole thing.
PAULINE:
Yes. I studied with Carl Whitaker at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison. And if any of you are old enough to have known him, you know, that he was irascible and he would call himself crazy. But mostly he taught me about paradox. When he said, for example, you can't get divorced to a seminar at the university. And many of the women in that group at that time had been newly divorced, and we got very angry over the years, I've come to realize what he meant and he's right. And I think in the book I wrote that I see my husband's good looks, and he really, my first husband's good looks in my children's faces today. And I feel, I feel like it was a good marriage for a high school sweetheart, and he was good father to my children, but as time went on, addiction took over and I had to decide whether or not the children would have one healthy parent. And it had to be me, and I had to go to Al-Anon do what was necessary. So the husband who just died was my second husband. And the love of my life. Yes, it was a hard, a hard loss.
ELISE:
So that, what you described it with your first husband, you would categorize as another type of ambiguous loss, right?
PAULINE:
Yes, I did. I think divorce is an ambiguous loss. It's a physical, ambiguous loss. That is, you're no longer living together, but especially if you've had children together, your paths cross again. It is psychological absence with physical absence. And so divorce can be confusing to some people because. It's not a death, nor should it be. And so you have to learn to live with the ambiguity, the ins and outs, the presence and absence of a divorced spouse coming in and out of your life. And it's possible to do so. Any of your listeners who have done that, they should pat themselves on the back for having the tolerance for an ambiguous loss, and living well, despite it. Adoption is another one that's quite common. And that would be for the mother who gave up a child, which is very difficult, I think because not much research attention is paid to that particular group of women.
It also involves the children of divorce. And at some point in time, they may wanna know who their parent. And many of them are able to find out, and some are not. Some countries have open adoptions for that very reason. And the United States is moving in that direction, but I think they have not gotten there entirely. And that's a problem. Foster Care also is an example of ambiguous loss, because foster children become attached to their foster siblings or their foster mothers sometimes, and then they are fostered out at age 18, and are not supposed to have any contact with these people, which is a silly rule. I'm sure it has some reason for being, but it's very hard on the children who are fostered out. Not, not a good idea.
ELISE:
I want to talk to you about the stages that you put into a six-point star in a way with this idea that… I loved the conversation about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Freud. We can talk about that maybe in a little bit, but this idea that there is no linear pathway to process loss, and that the experience is more of a zigzag, back and forth whirlwind, as you move through. You have Find Meaning, Reconstruct Identity, Discover New Hope, Revise Attachment, Normalize Ambivalence, and Adjust Mastery. Is there an order or do people just start it somewhere?
PAULINE:
I tend to have an order when I describe it, but I make a strong point that I do not believe in linear models, or in ordered models. Grief is different and experiencing loss is different for all people. And so I just think these six pillars are very important to deal with, but not in any particular order. For example, Find Meaning takes a long time. So you might start there, or maybe you would start with tempering mastery, Adjusting Mastery, you know, because we're very angry when we can't controls something. And so if somebody dies suddenly, or if COVID suddenly covers the world, this invisible virus that we couldn't see, we feel very helpless. Even if a loved one suddenly is given the diagnosis of a terminal illness, you feel helpless. So if you already are the kind of person who is very mastery reoriented, I was just talking with surgeons, for example, who are very mastery reoriented. This is very, very difficult for them in their private life. It’s difficult for attorneys in their private life. It's difficult for anyone who is accustomed to solutions, to fixing, to mastering a problem. When you are faced with one you can't fix immediately or ever.
ELISE:
And the antidote is just to acknowledge that you have a desire for control, and that you don't have any? Is that typically the process. I mean, I recognize this isn't a checklist and it's a long process, but is that what you coach people too is just to even recognize that that's the desire?
PAULINE:
No, I, I would start this way. What you are experiencing is ambiguous loss. It is the most stressful kind of loss there is because it remains unresolved. It is not your fault. And that's how I begin in any language, in any country around the world. And what they need to know is that while they're very masterful people, most of the time, what they're experiencing right now is something they can't master. Oh my gosh I think of the Ukrainians right now. Or I think of ourselves during the pandemic. We had to shut down, and things were not going our way. Young young people had to teach their own children in their own household. And unfortunately, so many mothers quit their jobs because of this. So we lost being in control, but it wasn't our fault. And it's very important for people to know that what they're feeling isn't their fault. And so often we give it an mental health label. Like we say, so many people are now depressed. I would like to challenge that, and say, most people now are sad. Or during, during the heights of COVID, I'm talking about, they were sad, and they were feeling helpless. And that, that was a normal reaction to an abnormal situation.
And, and so what people need is support for that rather than a medical illness, a diagnosis.
ELISE:
I know we love to pathologize things that are very natural, even death.
PAULINE:
And grief has been pathologized, but now I see anxiety as being pathologized. Frankly, if we didn't feel anxious during these last two years, there might have been something wrong with u, because the situation was one that would naturally produce anxiety.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think life in general, I was just reading a Joseph Campbell quote and he mentioned this it was like an ancient Chinese curse. “May you live during an interesting time, that's a curse. And it's like, yeah, we live in…
PAULINE:
That's wonderful.
ELISE:
We live in really interesting times. So COVID, I mean, all of it, it's been a perpetual onslaught for decades. I mean, at least a decade, it feels like. But I haven't lived as long as you have. I mean, you've seen a lot. It's not an unstressful time to be alive.
PAULINE:
For, for me, it reminded me of World War II, when I was a preteen. And it was a very anxious time for everyone, gathering around the radio each evening to hear the news, and being frightened. My father was an immigrant from Switzerland and of course, Switzerland was surrounded by Hitler's troops. And that was four years. But basically I'm an optimist. I think we go through troubled times, and then I think we come out of it stronger. That is, we're more resilient than we think. And if we're still standing after this pandemic, we should give ourselves a pat on the back.
ELISE:
I loved the way you brought that up at the end, you wrote: “This historical pattern of turmoil followed by change, reminds us that loss begets change, and change begets disorder and stress, and they beget change again.” So it is, it is, and despite these horrible times, and we'll talk, I wanna go through the rest of that list. And then I wanna talk about systemic racism, because you mentioned that earlier, and I think that's another big part of this and this and ambiguous loss, reconstruct identity.
PAULINE:
That's a big one. It turns out the researchers are finding out that's a big one. Whether we're talking about war to countries, or terror, or illness, or more everyday examples when, for example, you are the spouse of someone who has dementia, and they no longer know you. Frequently, they say things like, am I still a wife? Am I still a husband? If my spouse no longer knows me. Yes, you are. It's a both/and. You need to pay attention to your spouse. and you need to have a social life. And so go golfing, go out to dinner with other people, have an intimate relationship. But you are also married to this person who no longer knows you. So you should visit periodically. Not every day. You need to have a social life because what we found out about caregivers is that they die at a rate 63% higher than their same age group.
So caregiving is dangerous to your health and you have to work hard at maintaining your own health, your own needs, your own social life. So identity is a huge one. Who am I now that this ambiguous loss has happened? What are my roles? For example, if the husband in a family is missing an action, do they just leave the roles that he played unfulfilled or does the wife start taking over? And in my age group, there were gender roles. The men took care of financing and so on, and the women raised the children. But fortunately, today, younger couples, younger people have more flexible roles. So that filling the unfilled roles won't be so hard if someone goes missing, either for health reasons or for distance reasons. So identity is important. You need to know who you are and you need to know what roles you play and your particular family or your particular group.
And that has to be revised if somebody goes missing in that group. I call it normalizing ambivalence primarily because psychiatric ambivalence is considered diagnosable. But I'm talking about social ambivalence. It's a sociological term, meaning that you're ambivalent, you're feeling ambivalent about this person because of something that happened in the environment. That is, if you have a loved one who is missing physically, or missing psychologically, there are times when you're going to be angry about that. And you may even say, I wish it were over. I wish it were over. That means you wish them dead, and then you feel guilty. And so I'm normalizing that because I've never spoken to anybody who has had an ambiguous loss, who hasn't had that thought, especially if the loss goes on for a long time. The main thing is that you not act on it.
You recognize it and say it's normal. I both wish it were over, and I'm glad they're still here. So you use both/and thinking again. And then with attachment, primarily what I'm staying there is there's no closure of that. The attachment to the person who's lost changes. It cannot immobilize you because that's trouble if it does. And whether it's a clear-cut death, or an ambiguous loss that goes on for years, your attachment is different than it was when they were fully present for you. And we have to recognize that transformation.
ELISE:
Discover New Hope? Which I thought was a really beautiful one.
PAULINE:
Yes, yes. Now I had to change that title in the original 2006 book. It says Discovering Hope, and many people misunderstood, that I meant hoping for the missing person to come back, hoping for the Alzheimer's to be cured, hoping for the soldier who's missing to come walking out of the jungle. I did not mean that. So the title is now Discovering New Hope. You have to have something new to hope for. You might still keep hoping that somebody with a terminal illness might get better and indeed they do sometimes. Or you might hope as, after 9/11, that somebody be found who was in the Trade Towers when they fell down. And in fact, a few people were found in another country, or in a psychiatric ward, and not being able to remember who they were. But for the most part, you can keep hoping, and you move forward with life in a new way, without that missing person. You must do both. You cannot just hope because that means you're immobilized, you're frozen in place. And the children will suffer. The family will suffer. You will suffer. It has to be both/and.
ELISE:
I liked the questions that you asked too, like, what is your life like now without this person? What could you be or do now? What have you always wanted to do, but could not? Who were you before this relationship? I think that's really interesting. So I would imagine for people, you know, for example, I'm assuming you were married to your second husband for a really long time. It's hard to remember who you are outside of that?
PAULINE:
32 years and six years before that. So we were together 38 years. And I don't like the new identity of widow. The first time I had to check that box was I was a bit angry actually. So I guess I don't mind the word single. I mean, I'm very happy being single. I have plenty of friends and family around me. But for some reason, widow scratched a bit. It was probably denial of legally. That's what I am. But it isn't how I really see myself. I see myself as, of course, still remembering him and working hard to create his legacy that he deserves. But I am at the same time, moving forward, trying to find a new way to live it, and a single life, and to travel and to keep going to New York, which I love and the opera, or see friends and, and then go west. I love to travel. So I suspect I will keep writing and traveling.
ELISE:
And even in that language, moving forward, keep going, it's so much more accurate. It seems than this idea that we have of moving on, closure. Like somehow you're just gonna put him in a suitcase and stow it in the attic of your mind.
PAULINE:
Closure is such a bad word at. It’s a perfectly good word when it comes to business contracts, or closing a real estate deal, or closing a road after a snowstorm. That's where closure is a perfectly good word. But it's a terrible word in human relationships. It's cruel. It's mean. And people who have a death in the family, don't like it. When you say closure for the most part, as I wrote about Anderson Cooper, who's very wise about that. And after somebody who's had a murder in the family, they may say, well, now the trial is over, they convicted the murderer, the family has closure. No, they don't. They have justice. Closure implies finality. You shut the door. It's over, you wipe your hands of the situation. That is not what you do when someone you love or care about dies, or even when you have something inanimate, like a home that you've lost, but loved. Or a pet. You can't just say it's over. It's transformed though, you have to know that it's transformed once they don't breathe anymore. And yet you can keep them in your mind and your heart, and also at the same time, move forward with life in a new way without them.
ELISE:
Yeah. It's so interesting though. I mean, you write about this. There's such a socially. We love to press that on people. I mean, I think it makes us feel tidier, cleaner like that someone's good, they're done. You don't have to think about it, worry about it. But I think you write, “Closure for other people is oftentimes as a concept, far more important for other people in your life than it is for you.” It's not, as you say, it's not a reality, there is no such thing.
PAULINE:
I think it's because we're a mastery reoriented culture. We do not like suffering. We like winning, not losing, and suffering is viewed as…suffering is part of life. And again, the binary doesn't work. We have to witness other people's suffering. We have to not turn our back on it or say, aren't you over it yet? Which we do by the way, say that all too much. We have to be more patient and witness the suffering of others. And we don't have to say a thing. We just have to be there and, and say, can I help you? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Is usually the best thing to say.
ELISE:
Yeah. Um, I want to talk about George Floyd and systemic racism and the way that you believe that also, that there's a massive amount of ambiguous loss, in these last four, 500 years. I mean, it makes a tremendous amount of, we talk a lot about the trauma, but you talk about people, not the compounding of loss. People being torn away from their families, not having families, not knowing where they came from or who their people are. Just as one example, besides the brutality of slavery. How do you, if you were to treat the culture, how would you begin to…is it enough, or is the right beginning just saying this is cataclysmic ambiguous loss that's never been acknowledged. How do you start?
PAULINE:
Well, I think you're right. We start by naming it. You can't see it.You can't cope with something, unless it has a name. You have to know what the problem is before you can begin coping with it. I think I, myself, didn't know the extent of the problem until I was shut in, and then suddenly saw the George Floyd murder on television. But in fact, the demonstrations were right out my window. I live on the 10th floor in downtown Minneapolis. So this all took place very near to me. And I could not see it. And I think that was true for people maybe worldwide because suddenly people were shut-in maybe having their TV sets on more and saw this wonderful video, not wonderful is the wrong word. Um, this fortunate video that Darnella Frazier took, a brave girl, brave 17-year-old girl who stood there five feet from the person, the murderer of George Floyd who told to stop, and she did not.
And so that video taught us that this is worse than we thought it was. Police brutality is taking place more than we know. And down the line, we learned more that health disparities were broader than we thought, food disparities. People were living paycheck to paycheck than I ever had realized, even though I did once in my lifetime too. I somehow forgot about that. So I think we were brought back to reality, and now there are several things that need to be identified. And if the theory of ambiguous loss can be of help, it will be in giving a name to certain things that have been nameless before. The cross-generational transmission of trauma from slavery was due to an ambiguous loss way back then when families were sold on the auction, apart from each other. And I think climate change may also be an ambiguous loss. I will leave that up to other researchers to determine and study. But I think giving it a name may bring it into the eyes and ears, policy makers of people who make big decision, because we haven't got time not to act on this one.
ELISE:
Going back to how, as a culture, we like mastery, we like to solve problems. We like to hit the nail right on the head. Right now, there are so many things that lack definition. And so we don't know how to hit that nail. So defining it helps, even though we have to get past this desire for mastery and this fear of uncertainty and ambiguity. Do you think that that's culture-wide or gendered, or do you see any difference?
PAULINE:
Well, I have a problem with patriarchy because that implies who the master is. I have great trouble with that. I also think that you need women on equal footing, at the table for big and small decisions, because in some sense, if women are at the table, I don't mean to generalize, but they are more likely to have children in mind, the family in mind, because we are connected. We are almost biologically connected in a way that the that's how we think, many of us. And if we don't think systemically about the other people around us, the children, the next generation, and our families. If we only think about power, and land grabbing, and money making, then we have a problem. So it isn't exactly just male, female, but it may, you'd need to have some research on this, but it may lean more to the fact that we need to have more women at the table of major decision making, in order to make this world inhabitable for a long time yet. In order for it to be humane, in order for it to take into account the disparities, that the fact that children should not be raised in poverty, they shouldn't have to in a developed country, and we should care for even the children in a non-developed country.
I'm very strong on the fact that you need to have that front and center. I can't understand why people don't see daycare, and after school care, and care after you have a baby to stay home and connect with that baby for fathers and mothers. I just think that that's not even negotiable. So that's how I feel the world should be more so, and in a patriarchy it's somehow the it's lost. And it dare not be lost.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and this might be too out there, but when you think about the creation of the patriarchy and the suppression of sort of the goddess culture that was preexistent, and I guess you'd call it Old Europe. But this instinctive understanding that that women, women were venerated as these as sort of the nature principles, the creators of life and death, and that's the goddess. And then it was replaced, you know, within patriarchy with this male God, at least in the
PAULINE:
And witchcraft.
ELISE:
Witchcraft, certainly we, we know what happens is…
PAULINE:
They burned the witches at the stake.
ELISE:
But you think about too, so much of that, I think is a fear of death, fear of the cycle of life, fear of nature. And I don't think we'll reorder our relationship to death and loss, not that it will ever be easier, but until we allow that principle to reemerge, and I think it's why we have such a horrible relationship with our planet.
PAULINE:
I think you're right. I agree with you. The fear of death. That book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker was written so long ago in the twenties, I think. It's still with us, the denial of death and the denial of ambiguity, ambiguous loss. I mean, those things have to be faced, and I think we're mature enough now as a country to face them. And certainly COVID has taught us something about ambiguity, about mastery not always being there. By the way, I wanted to say, I'm very proud of our mastery orientation in this country because we've cured illnesses and we've honestly, goodness, put, put a camera into far out of space now. And little helicopters on Mars. I love that. I love it. But because we're so mastery reoriented, we're not very good with accepting what we can't control. So that's where that tolerance for ambiguity comes in.
ELISE:
Yeah. No. And it's, it's that both/and. When you talk about Freud, when you talked about your book as a memoir, an academic memoir, I can't remember how you described it, but when you went into some of the personal writings of these people who have defined psychology, or Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who sort of had her five stages of dying co-opted and turned into five stages of grief. I don't think people really realize that, but Freud who, you know, a lot of us have some problems with Freud as much as many, many great revelations. But when he writes sort of personally, this is so interesting and, and maybe collectively will start to see the bridging of this. He writes to a friend who lost a child all, “Although we know after such a loss, the acute state of mourning will subside. We also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute, no matter what may fill the gap. Even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love, which we do not want to relinquish.” Is that beautiful. It's so beautiful. And yet, so Freud, right. So like not in mastery of…
PAULINE:
But then he goes on to, to write about detachment in his academic writings. I'm going to continue to read Freud's personal writings, and Kubler-Ross's personal writings because, and I, I hope I haven't made the same mistake from my academic writings to more personal writings. But somehow they come alive in a way that I could not see in their personal writings, Kubler-Ross had Swiss parents, like I have had. And as a result, we probably are more orderly and mastery oriented, which is the culture of the Swiss, for precision. So she gave five stages of grief. But in her later years, her later books with Kessler, she changed her mind and she says, it's messy. It's not orderly. And the five stages of grief were never meant for the mourner.
They were always meant for the person who was dying, but she says, it's not even right here. She said, it's messy. She had strokes, starting nine years before she died. And she couldn't walk. And this woman who was very, very, very independent and she couldn't walk, can you imagine? And she hated it. She felt like she was on the runway of an airstrip and couldn't get off the ground. She wanted to get off the ground and die, but she couldn't. And so acceptance came to her, after nine years of anger, shortly before she died. Her son said so. It doesn't go in the neat, orderly way. So I encourage people to forget about her five stages and remember her, she needs to be remembered for having started the worldwide hospice movement. And for that, I will be forever grateful to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, but forget about her five stages. They were meant for the dying and not even that.
ELISE:
But it's interesting how we gravitate. We love those lists. We love those lists!
PAULINE:
Primarily because they come to an end and then we think we're done with it. So they give us an illusion of closure and there isn't a closure.
ELISE:
I love that Pauline Boss is giving language to these experiences that really mark all of our lives, but have been nebulous, unboundaried, not recognized or honored as real. And I do agree with her that giving them a name, at least makes them real, or something that can be assessed, processed, considered. And I also love her push against this idea of closure, and against this mythology that’s convenient to all of us who don’t want to think about hard things, but isn’t the reality for anyone who is sitting at the center of loss. There is no such thing. And I think collectively, the sooner we can move past that idea that there’s a box to check, that we’ll be done, that we’ll never miss the person again, we won’t feel pain, well, I think we’ll be a healthier, and ironically happier society once we learn to embrace that type of ambiguity. I also love how inclusive and expansive the idea is, because, and I love that at 87, Pauline Boss wrote about ghosting in her book, and that she even knows what that concept is. But we’ve all had that experience, whether you’re dating someone, or it’s a friendship break-up, or job loss, where you don’t have an answer. Nobody is sitting down to explain to you exactly what happened. And even then, it would only be one side of truth. So often, we have to live with a nebulous ideas of a version of reality that is just not complete. So I hope that her work touches you and speaks to you in a way that maybe covers off on an experience you’ve had in life, or gives it a little bit of shape, or normalizes it without pathologizing it.