TRANSCRIPT FOR PAULINE BOSS — THE MYTH OF CLOSURE
Excerpted from this excellent interview:
MS. TIPPETT: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, exploring complicated grief, the myth of closure, and learning to hold the losses in our midst, with Pauline Boss. She created the field of “ambiguous loss.”
MS. TIPPETT: It's so interesting how there's this whole new field now of epigenetics, of how trauma transmits itself generationally and the way future generations — not so much as an exact memory, but as a response that is conditioned by the trauma that actually happened to previous generations.
And then recently, as I've been writing, I've been thinking a lot about growing up with a father who was adopted, who had this loss of memory. But thinking about how that affected me and the family indirectly. So I’m just curious about how you see that kind of loss that happened to previous generations, like, how you see that turn up, and how you work with that.
DR. BOSS: I think there is a generational transmission of trauma regarding ambiguous loss. Drew Gilpin Faust wrote the book The Republic of Suffering.
MS. TIPPETT: And she was the president of Harvard?
DR. BOSS: Harvard. She was the president of Harvard.
MS. TIPPETT: But she's a psychologist, originally?
DR. BOSS: No, she's a historian.
MS. TIPPETT: Historian. OK, right.
DR. BOSS: And she makes the point that our republic, our country, was founded on unresolved loss because of the Civil War and all the tragedy that happened there, and that many of these bodies never came home, and so on. So it was not really resolved in the usual way, and as a result, our republic is founded on suffering. And I think she pretty much leaves it there, but I would carry it further by saying it wasn't just the Civil War.
It was slavery. It was the uprooting of the American Indians. It was all the immigrants that have come since then. And every genocide that has happened worldwide creates a society of suffering that is ancestral suffering that passes down through family patterns and family processes. Sometimes we don't even know. After the Holocaust, for example, the first generation didn't speak of it.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. BOSS: Many times, the traumatized first generation doesn't speak of it. The soldiers are that way too. Then the second generation wonders why and are angry at their parents. And it may be the third generation, the grandchildren, who finally get the answer. But at any rate...
MS. TIPPETT: Of what happened.
DR. BOSS: Of what happened, and why grandpa is the way he is, or why grandma is the way she is. And so the story finally comes out, perhaps because the grandparent is now approaching old age and thinks they better share the story while they still can.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. BOSS: Even when the stories aren't told, however, there's a transmission of the trauma by, let's say, having a parent who is not expressive, a parent who doesn't speak much, a parent who can't show love or emotion, or a parent who may have been brutalized who then passes on the violence. So there's a lot we don't know about what happens when this is transmitted. And what we do need to know is that our society as a whole — not just families, but our society as a whole — I think, is afraid of talking about death, and is afraid of talking about suffering, and having people gone lost and grieving for a long time primarily because of this transmission of trauma ancestrally. That we are a nation founded on unresolved grief — as a result, we don't like to talk about death and we don't, for sure, like to talk about ambiguous loss.
MS. TIPPETT: And one person you refer to often who is Viktor Frankl.
DR. BOSS: I do.
MS. TIPPETT: He wrote Man's Search for Meaning.
DR. BOSS: Mm-hmm.
MS. TIPPETT: Which many people have read. And of course, he was writing out of this example of horrific violence and loss and ambiguity. And yet, insisting on acknowledging the horror of that, right?
DR. BOSS: He did, he did.
MS. TIPPETT: Letting that be true forever and also insisting that meaning can be found.
DR. BOSS: Yes. And he was the one who said, “Without meaning there is no hope, but without hope there is no meaning.” So he tied those together. What we know now is that the search for meaning is critical in situations of loss, clear or ambiguous, and in situations of trauma. This is very difficult. For example, if a child dies, or if a child commits suicide, or is murdered, or if a loved one disappears at sea — it's nonsensical. But my point is that, too, is a meaning. The fact that it's meaningless is a meaning, and it always will be meaningless.
MS. TIPPETT: Say some more. What do you mean?
DR. BOSS: If something is nonsensical, totally without logic, without meaning, as many of these terrible events are, then I think we have to leave it there. But I think we have to label it as it's meaningless.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.
DR. BOSS: And I can live with something meaningless, someone might say, but what I've found is as long as I have something else in my life that is meaningful.
MS. TIPPETT: So the search for meaning remains — that stays vital, but you don't necessarily locate the meaning in that terrible thing. You have to find the meaning elsewhere in your life.
DR. BOSS: You may find it elsewhere. And many people...
MS. TIPPETT: And let that be good enough.
DR. BOSS: Exactly. I like that term, “good enough,” Krista. That's — in fact, I wrote a chapter on “good enough.” We really have to give up on perfection, of a perfect answer. There are a lot of situations that have no perfect answer. And so, let's say the mother of a kidnapped child may then in fact devote her life to helping prevent other children from going missing. And you see that all the time.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. BOSS: Where people who have terrible things happen to them then transform it into something that may help others. That's a way of finding meaning in meaninglessness.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. I mean, you've even started talking — I think the writing you're doing now and I feel like what is absorbing you now is really — the phrase you're using is “the myth of closure.”
DR. BOSS: Yes.
MS. TIPPETT: That in fact, I don't know when that word got inserted into our vocabulary. Maybe you can speak to that, but that that word has lead us astray.
DR. BOSS: I believe that. I think “closure,” though, is a perfectly good word for real estate and business deals. So, I don't want to demonize the word “closure.”
MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Right. Yeah.
DR. BOSS: But “closure” is a terrible word in human relationships. Once you've become attached to somebody, love them, care about them, when they're lost, you still care about them. It's different. It's a different dimension. But you can't just turn it off. And we look around down the street from me — there's a Thai restaurant where there's a plate of fresh food in the window every day for their ancestors. Are they pathological? No. That's a cultural way to remember your ancestors. And somehow in our society, we've decided, once someone is dead, you have to close the door. But we now know that people live with grief. They don't have to get over it. It's perfectly fine. I'm not talking about obsession, but just remembering.
Please go here for the full interview transcript: http://www.onbeing.org/program/pauline-boss-the-myth-of-closure/transcript/8761
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