Navigating Ambiguity

By Rebecca Crichton

When I taught leadership at Boeing, the name of the course for mid-level managers was the same as this essay. The image on the course book cover was a person holding an umbrella, balancing on a wavy tightrope. It portrayed the reality of those managers. They were caught between bosses who made the policies and their employees who were affected by them.

Definitions of ambiguity include:

• The quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.
• A situation or statement that is unclear because it can be understood in more than one way.

Simply put, ambiguity is the lack of certainty. I appreciate the possibilities of open-ended categories, which match my high tolerance for ambiguity.

More than 40 years ago, I felt called to work with people experiencing grief and bereavement. Over the years, I facilitated many grief support groups, lectured about how grief shows up in our lives, acknowledged that life deals us hands we didn’t want and are forced to accept.

Recently, I encountered a term first described by Dr. Pauline Boss in the 1970s. In her 2011 book, Loving Someone Who Has Dementia: How to Find Hope While Coping with Stress and Grief, she discusses ambiguous loss — “having a loved one both here and not here, physically present but psychologically absent.”

After decades of debate, the newest edition of the DSM-5 (the manual in which most mental health conditions are named and described and serve as guidelines for professionals) has now officially determined that ‘normal grief’ can last a year. After my initial snort of irritation, I grant it is an improvement from the earlier position that people should be done grieving significant loss within six months. To me, the idea of ambiguous loss seems both powerful and empowering. We in the grief field, and those who have mourned the deaths of people close to them, know that very few people are ‘done’ with grief within that period. We know that people get through grief, not over it.

In my twelve years as Executive Director of NWCCA, I have become increasingly aware of the deep connections between aging and grief. I know both intellectually and emotionally that ambiguous loss is about far more than relating to someone with dementia. I see how it shows up in the lives of friends and family, in situations where what used to be has changed, and the outcome is neither knowable nor predictable.

Grief and loss are embedded in a matrix of different emotions and behaviors. Anger, guilt, despair, confusion, exhaustion, erratic behavior — all can be tied to grief. We know that recent losses layer on top of older losses, often activating the feelings and behaviors related to those earlier ones, as well as the most recent.

How we do this includes everything we know about resilience and reframing. Pauline Boss offers six guidelines for coping with the ambiguity of life’s losses:

• Finding Meaning is all about making sense of the loss and finding a new purpose.
• Adjusting Mastery is about recognizing your degree of control in the situation.
• Reconstructing Identity is how a person comes to understand their new identity.
• Normalizing Ambivalence refers to coming to terms with conflicting feelings.
• Revising Attachment is recognizing that a loved one is both here and gone.
• Discovering New Hope means discovering something new to hope for.

We all navigate our own path through loss. Information and approaches from experts and others help us chart our own course. Nobody else can tell you what works for you. We can trust our built-in capacity to manage loss.