A Loss Without a Name

On the morning of the tsunami in 2004, Lakshmi’s son Raju went out to sea in his fishing boat. The boat was found three days later, broken on the rocks. Raju was never found. Twenty years have passed. Lakshmi still keeps his shirts folded in the steel cupboard, and she still looks up when a motorbike stops outside the house.

A loss that does not end

When someone dies, the loss is terrible, but it is clear. There is a body, a cremation or a burial, and days of prayers. Relatives come to sit with the family. Everyone agrees that a death has happened, and so grief can begin.

Lakshmi had none of this. Nobody could tell her whether her son was dead or alive. The priest did not know which rites to perform. Some relatives told her to accept that he was gone. Others told her never to give up hope. She did not know whether to mourn him or to wait for him, so she did both, every day, for years.

The family therapist Pauline Boss has studied losses like this for decades. She calls them ambiguous losses, which simply means unclear losses. They are losses with no clear ending and no clear answer. She found that they are among the most stressful losses a person can face, precisely because they never end.

Two kinds of unclear loss

Lakshmi’s loss is the first kind. The person is gone from sight, but they remain alive in the heart and the mind of the family. This happens when someone goes missing, is lost in a disaster, or moves far away and stops calling.

The second kind is the opposite. The person is still here in body, but their mind or spirit seems to have gone. This happens with dementia, a serious brain injury, addiction or deep depression. The family sees the person every day, and still they feel that they have lost them.

Some families live with both kinds at once. A woman whose husband is missing may also be caring for a mother with dementia. A child whose father has disappeared may also lose their mother to grief and worry, even though she is still at home.

It is not your fault

For years, Lakshmi believed that something was wrong with her. Other women in the village had lost sons and husbands, and they seemed to have moved on. Why could she not? She blamed herself for not stopping Raju from going out that morning. She blamed herself for still hoping.

Then a counsellor came to the village with a group that worked with tsunami families. She sat with the mothers whose children were never found, and she gave their pain a name. “This is called an unclear loss,” she said. “It is one of the hardest losses there is. You are not weak, and you are not doing grief wrongly. The problem is that nobody can give you an answer.”

Lakshmi said later that this was the first time in years she had felt understood. Nothing about her situation had changed. But she stopped blaming herself, and she began to look for ways to live with the question instead of trying to answer it.

Why “closure” does not fit

People often talk about “closure”, as if every loss should end with a door firmly shut. With an unclear loss, the door cannot be shut, because nobody knows what is on the other side. Expecting closure only adds a feeling of failure. A more useful aim is to learn to live well, even without an answer. The next guides show how other families have done this.

How it is now for Lakshmi

Lakshmi still keeps Raju’s shirts in the cupboard. Every year, on the anniversary, she lights a lamp at the shore with the other mothers. She still does not know what happened to her son, and she has accepted that she may never know. But she no longer feels that something is wrong with her. She now looks after her grandchildren, and she tells them stories about their uncle who loved the sea.