I fought back tears with everything I had. She wouldn’t turn around to look at us, but I have it on good authority she was doing the same (she told me later). We were in a large, bustling airport and my baby girl had her back to us as she stood in the line at security and walked out of our lives forever. I don’t mean to be dramatic because it wasn’t like she was angry at us. She was simply spreading her wings. And we were proud, and distraught and trudging disconsolately through the “depths of despair” in the fashion of one of my literary heroines, Anne Shirley. Baby girl was going off to start her adult life that she had so desperately wanted since her early teenage years. It’s tough being a thirty-year-old trapped in a chronological body half as old. And so I continued my unwitting acquaintance with ambiguous grief, though we were not properly introduced until last week.
You most certainly know the meaning of the word grief, even if you have been lucky enough to not have experienced it. And though I have often heard the word ‘ambiguous’ and was reasonably certain it meant ‘undefined’, I looked up the definition. As those who know me can readily attest, I have an affinity for words, and I want to use them precisely.
Merriam-Webster declared that ambiguous had two meanings:
- Open to more than one interpretation.
- adj. Doubtful or uncertain.
Thereafter, I went searching for a definition of the term ‘ambiguous grief’, which a writer friend of mine had introduced me to via a podcast that her friend had sent her. Here is what I found on a website named after this newly developed branch of psychology: [Ambiguous grief] is the feeling experienced from the loss of a loved one who is still living, accompanied by a change in or death of the relationship.
Go ahead. Read that again. I’ll wait. I don’t know how many times I reread it. Soaking it in.
Although nobody had actually died, nobody was ‘missing in action’ or in the prison of dementia, there was an undeniable change in the relationship between my very-much-alive independent daughter and the forlorn family she was leaving behind. A loss of connection or a change in a relationship indeed seems worthy of being dubbed ‘grief’ even if that grief looks different than that which we associate with physical death. It is indeed loss. Not ’empty nest syndrome’, exactly, as we still have youngest boy at home but more of a Displaced Parent Anonymous… call it whatever you like.
I realize now, more than two years after we moved back to the mainland, that I have been in a funk since my daughter left for her new life 3 short months after we said goodbye to our beloved island. Try as I might during all that time, I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong with me. Where is this melancholy coming from? Can we grieve a place as much as we grieve the loss of a person? What if that place reminds you of that person? It’s a double-whammy of sorts, that’s for sure.
In March of 2018, my daughter returned to Texas with us with the understanding that it was just for the summer and then we would help her relocate to the Pacific North West. The summer flew and sure enough in July she packed her bags, flew to California to meet a friend and then we would meet her later in Seattle to help her get settled. Loss upon Loss. Expected losses and yet, as a woman who feels things deeply, I had not found it simple to ‘move on’ with my life. Leaving our island I lost the close camaraderie I had cultivated with nature: the ocean, the mountains, and my beloved turtles. But to be completely candid, we had moved to Hawaii for our daughter and now to lose her daily presence with us just seemed like too much loss in too short of a timespan. Life often seems to work that way, doesn’t it?
When any loss rubs against another it just compounds the heartbreak. Whether you are grieving a child leaving (physically or emotionally), a parent moving to a care facility because they are slipping away to Alzheimer’s or just beyond the scope of the care you can provide, a job reassignment to a different part of the country or maybe the loss of your health or a cherished friendship…grief wears many faces. It doesn’t help much to minimize our grief or think about the people who “have it worse than we do” if it means denying our legitimate pain. We are all grieving at different times during our lives. Perhaps some of you are grieving the loss of someone in the recent pandemic or the rapidly decaying moral fabric of society.
When gratefulness is much needed but the soul is fully deflated, how do we recover? Is the “new normal” a elusive mirage that we will forever be chasing like the end of the rainbow? How do we honor the One who made us to be “thankful in all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) by setting our eyes on Him? What about when all the verses and platitudes are just not cutting it and getting through a single day is about all that you can muster? And some days you aren’t even sure you can do that?
You and I may be grieving. And that’s okay. But it’s not okay to stay mired in our loss… we will talk about strategies for moving beyond the pain, next time.
Decidedly Different 