Frozen Grief and Delicious Ambiguity
“Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment, and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity… I may never be able to control the fear and panic, but I have learned how to control how I live each day.”
Comedian Gilda Radner, in her book “It’s Always Something” written before she died of ovarian cancer in 1986.
It took me, a grief therapist and researcher, a long while to recognize that my sadness and melancholy because of climate change was grief. Grieving from fires, grieving dead people and animals, grieving blue skies and clean air, grieving for my granddaughter’s future, grieving for vanishing species and ecosystems, grieving the loss of feeling safe and hopeful and trusting about the future, grieving for all living things that are suffering heat, drought, floods, hurricanes, violent storms, food scarcity. So much grief.
Most climate grief is disenfranchised grief. This type of grief results from an “ambiguous loss,” which is a loss that is not socially recognized and supported. Traditional examples of ambiguous loss include parents whose teenager ran away a decade ago with no word since, a wife whose husband is on life support at a nearby care home, a teen war refugee who immigrates to another country, a child whose pet has died. In each case, the losses are not well-recognized: the runaway hasn’t been declared dead, the husband is still alive and physically present, the teen has moved to a safer country, the child’s pet can be replaced. Because there is not a clear recognition of their loss, a person is deprived of their “right” to grieve and the social support to help get them through.
These days, however, we recognize that a person doesn’t have to experience the finality of death to grieve. We grieve when we lose a job, or get divorced, or lose our health, or our child goes to university, or when we live through a pandemic.
Therapist and researcher Pauline Boss coined the term “disenfranchised grief” and first called it “frozen grief” to convey that people often become frozen within the grieving process when they experience an ambiguous loss. Without social and community recognition and support, many do not even realize they are grieving, or they may push their grief aside because it is not seen as valid in the eyes of others. They become stuck in their grief and unable to move through it. When we deny or close the door on our grief, it becomes immovable.
When it hit me that I was grieving due to the climate crisis, it was both overwhelming and liberating. Overwhelming because, for the first time, I had to really acknowledge the realities and my feelings. I could not use denial or avoidance or naïve hope to cope. I had to deliberately look at facts I had been avoiding - and face the full spectrum of my feelings for the first time.
I also had to face a new reality – that my awakening separated me from others who were close to me and who did not share my grief. This grieving has been a solitary struggle. My husband, my family, my friends, my peers, are all at different points in coming to grips with the climate crisis and we do not necessarily share common losses.
The realization that I was grieving was also liberating because I could begin to understand and process what I was feeling. My sorrow, frustration, anger, sadness, lethargy, hopelessness, ambiguity, guilt, exasperation, numbness, depression, unease – all these feelings and more percolating under the surface of my daily life that I was masking because my grief was not shared, supported, or understood – at least I could now name them.
However, this new awareness has created a tough place to sit, and I continue to work to find peace and a way forward. Here are some things I have learned.
A key is learning to live with ambiguity, uncertainty, and shades of gray, without giving up and while maintaining hope. Black/white, all or nothing thinking or behaviors are not helpful.
Acknowledge what has been irretrievably lost and mourn for those things. When a carbon threshold is reached, or a species becomes extinct, or when a community is burned to the ground and irrevocably changed – mourn those events. Mourn with others, mourn through ritual, find a way to acknowledge and grieve specific unchangeable losses. Accept what we cannot change.
Identify what has not yet been lost and find a way to make a positive impact. Small steps add up to big changes. A secret to coping with the pain of ambiguous loss it to avoid feeling helpless. Work to change what can still be changed.
Strive to replace longing for certainty with comfort with ambiguity. Events can be a loss to me but not to others. I can feel safe in the present moment and unsafe in the future. I can grieve for the natural world and celebrate its beauty and resilience. I can feel pessimistic and hopeful. I can see truths in differing perspectives.
Recognize that ambiguity has gifts. Ambiguity creates opportunities for creativity and new ways of being and a chance for growth. Living with ambiguity and learning to live with uncertainty can increase strength and resilience, increase comfort with risk-taking, spontaneity and change, and decrease dependence on stability.
Temper the hunger for mastery and the need for control. I notice climate activists often become siloed in their work and criticize others who do not believe or behave as they do, despite the fact that others may be working towards the same larger goals. This is counterproductive and a recipe for mental distress.
The last and most difficult part of resolving grief is making sense of it and finding hope. How do we transform a situation that we may not be able to change? Remember Sisyphus pushing the rock to the top of the mountain knowing there was no hope of succeeding, that the rock would just roll back down once he reached the top and he would have to start again tomorrow. How can we make sense of a hopeless situation like his? If I were his therapist, I would work with him to transform the meaning of his experience from getting the rock to the top of the mountain, to something else – a hope of seeing the beauty of the sunset each day, a hope to become strong in body and mind, a hope to save another person from his fruitless task. The meaning we give to our experiences can be truly transformational.
How to thrive with the ambiguous losses and disenfranchised grief caused by climate change? I leave you with some “delicious ambiguity.” For each of us, the answers will be different.
Hear Pauline Boss in an excellent interview about modern-day ambiguous loss here.