The Myth of Closure

Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change

By: Pauline Boss PhD

Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers

Length: 3 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

How do we begin to cope with loss that cannot be resolved?

The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us haunted by feelings of anxiety, despair, and even anger. In this audiobook, pioneering therapist Pauline Boss identifies these vague feelings of distress as caused by ambiguous loss, losses that remain unclear and hard to pin down, and thus have no closure. Collectively the world is grieving as the pandemic continues to change our everyday lives.

With a loss of trust in the world as a safe place, a loss of certainty about health care, education, and employment, lingering anxieties plague many of us, even as parts of the world are opening back up again. Yet after so much loss, our search must be for a sense of meaning, and not something as elusive and impossible as “closure”.

This book provides many strategies for coping: encouraging us to increase our tolerance of ambiguity and acknowledging our resilience as we express a normal grief, and still look to the future with hope and possibility.

©2022 by Pauline Boss (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing

Ambiguous loss

Recommended for understanding of grief, loss and resilience. Excellent review of ambiguous loss in all its forms.

Closure Not Just Elusive also biased

Nicely narrated book about why closure is so very elusive. I would’ve given 5 stars except the last chapter and afterword give specific examples of grief which are very biased, one-sided and often in error. The grief caused by lack of acknowledgment of these “non-addressed” views seems to be a large oversight. When the secular world views your grief as “baseless,” it’s no wonder there is no possibility of resolution of injury to even approach closure.