4.4 • 102.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2022
⏱️ 37 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hi, my name is Meg Bernhardt. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine. |
0:13.9 | In July 2020, my grandfather was living in a care facility in Texas, and I was living |
0:21.2 | pretty far away from him. Our family found out that he'd caught COVID and from everything |
0:26.8 | we'd been reading and hearing at the time, it seemed that his survival as someone who's |
0:31.7 | especially vulnerable was pretty unlikely. So we decided to drive halfway across the |
0:39.0 | country to Texas, just so we could see him and possibly be able to say goodbye to him |
0:45.5 | through a closed window. He passed away from COVID on July 8th. I was feeling an immense |
0:54.2 | amount of guilt. I hadn't really been present at the end of his life, and I couldn't |
0:59.8 | really do anything to change his situation. I decided that I wanted to stick around in |
1:05.8 | Texas and wait for him to be cremated, because driving his ashes home personally felt like |
1:12.4 | the most dignified thing I could do for him. So one day, while I was waiting to receive |
1:18.3 | the ashes, I was cooking lunch and listening to the on-being podcast by Krista Tippett. |
1:25.4 | Her guest was a family sciences researcher named Pauline Boss, who in the 1970s coined |
1:32.9 | this term, ambiguous loss. At its core, Boss's theory is about any loss whose nature is uncertain. |
1:43.7 | She challenges the traditional Kuhler Ross and Freudian theories of grief, which tell |
1:48.5 | us that grief is a linear process and that it has a prescribed endpoint. What Boss is saying |
1:55.4 | is there's actually no timeline for mourning these losses. They might not ever end because |
2:01.7 | that person could still be with us, physically or psychologically. And Bigger's loss was |
2:07.5 | a way to describe the reality that my family and I had been living for a decade. My grandfather |
2:13.6 | had been physically far away, but even when he was near us, he felt absent. He had Alzheimer's. |
2:21.4 | He couldn't remember my face or name, and he could barely even remember my mom, his |
2:25.6 | own daughter. Boss, who's 87 years old, has a new book out called The Myth of Closure. |
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