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The concept, Boss maintains, is inclusive, encompassing a range of moderate to severe losses that we might not perceive as such.
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Can you mourn someone whose body is present, even if the mind isn’t? Or whose death is unconfirmed? Can you grieve a foreclosed future? Theirs were losses without “conclusion,” in the traditional sense of the term, an experience of paradox - a simultaneous absence and presence - that eluded resolution. Over the next several decades, Boss studied and provided therapy to the family members of Alzheimer’s patients, as well as the relatives of people whose bodies were never recovered after natural disasters, or in the collapse of the original World Trade Center on 9/11. Could such experiences even be considered losses? Boss, observing how families spoke about their missing relatives, coined a term to define the unclear - and often unacknowledged - absences in their lives: “ambiguous loss.” Rather than being tied to a specific event, these losses frequently extended over many years, deepening each day in ways that grievers could not register. There were often no bodies, and thus no rituals for mourning. But in the cases Boss studied, losses lacked such authoritative certainty. Sometimes, as in the case of a death accompanied by a body and a certificate, the scope of loss is relatively clear. Each situation created a sensation of limbo for family members, a lingering sense of grief over losses whose nature was uncertain. The fathers were psychologically absent but physically present, while the fighter pilots were the reverse. Her initial studies in the 1970s focused on families in which fathers were too busy working to spend time with their children, and later on the wives of fighter pilots who were missing in action during the Vietnam War. Nearly 50 years ago, as a doctoral student in child development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researched families with at least one member who was either physically or psychologically absent. With her husband’s drawn-out illness, Boss’s life came to resemble the cases she’d spent her career studying. Once solely his wife, she was now also his caregiver. Boss was also confused about her role in their partnership. She felt a range of contradictory feelings: gratitude for their time together, grief over the loss of their old rhythms and anxiety at the inevitability of his death. “It sneaks up on you,” Boss said of the burden of caregiving and its attendant emotional struggles. Then, their only visitors were home health aides once they left, Boss would take care of her husband, changing the dressing on his bandages and administering his medications. Vascular issues resulted in open wounds on his legs.ĭespite his illness, the couple maintained a semblance of normalcy, entertaining guests, going for drives and attending the theater, until last year, when the pandemic isolated them in the apartment. In 2000, he was using a cane by last year, when he was 88, rheumatoid arthritis had rendered him unable to walk. Boss, an emeritus professor of family social science - the study of families and close relationships - chose the place seven years ago because her husband’s declining health had made it difficult for him to climb the stairs of their house near the University of Minnesota, where she taught. The view, however spectacular, was not the apartment’s selling point. Out the window, the Mississippi River churned under bridges, past the tangle of downtown.
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Bookshelves were filled with works of sociology, psychology and history a section was devoted primarily to Sigmund Freud, and another to Boss’s hometown, New Glarus, Wis.
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The apartment was bright, with two walls of windows pouring sky into the space. “Can we shake hands?” she asked, smiling. She cautiously extended a hand toward me. Boss, who is 87, greeted me in her building’s lobby wearing thick-framed glasses, her light blonde hair short and an Apple Watch clasped on her left wrist. When I first visited Pauline Boss in late May, Minneapolis was on the cusp of fully reopening.
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