When Closure Isn't Possible: How to Find a Way Forward Through Grief

We’re often told that "closure" is the final goal of grief—the moment we finally close the door on the past. But what if that door doesn't close? What if it shouldn't?

In S6E45, we’re challenging the cultural rush to find an ending. We discuss "Ambiguous Loss" and why reframing your perspective is more healing than waiting for an answer that may never arrive.

Healing isn’t about closing the door; it’s about learning how to live with it open. https://bit.ly/3ZQBqWG

What You'll Learn:

• What psychologists mean by “closure”
• Why some people need certainty more than others
• When closure helps—and when it hurts
• Why do some losses never provide answers
• How meaning can exist without resolution

Key Takeaways:

• Closure is not a requirement for healing
• Some grief is ongoing, not solvable
• Waiting for answers can keep us stuck
• Meaning can evolve even without resolution

In this Episode:

• 00:00 - Intro
• 03:54 - How Goals Change as Circumstances Change - An Excerpt from We Are Not Ourselves
• 06:48 - Is Closure Always Necessary? Is It Always Possible?
• 07:42 - What Is Closure?
• 09:04 - Is Closure a Good Thing?
• 10:45 - Can You Ever Really Get Closure?
• 12:41 - Discussion - How Perception Changes Over Time, Tragic Loss
• 22:16 - Ambiguous Loss - Can it Extend to Society?
• 24:35 - Outro

#GriefAndLoss #Closure #AmbiguousLoss #UnresolvedGrief #MentalHealthEducation #PsychologyOfGrief #EveryoneDiesPodcast #LifeAfterLoss #BereavementSupport #AmbiguousGrief

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 3:54 How Goals Change as Circumstances Change – An Excerpt from We Are Not Ourselves
• 6:48 Is Closure Always Necessary? Is It Always Possible?
• 7:42 What Is Closure?
• 9:04 Is Closure a Good Thing?
• 9:04 Can You Ever Really Get Closure?
• 12:41 Discussion – How Perception Changes Over Time, Tragic Loss
• 22:16 Ambiguous Loss – Can it Extend to Society?
• 24:35 Outro

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies. Today's topic is about closure. So relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.

Because even though everyone dies, no one has to face it unprepared. I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I used my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every person viewpoint to our podcast.

We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions before a crisis hits. And please remember that this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. So please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording.

In the first half, I'm going to be talking about our recipe of the week, and I have a reading for you from the book, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas. In the second half, Charlie is exploring the topic of closure. And in the third half, we're going to be talking about something.

What are we talking about? Ambiguous losses. Oh, so it's not about the new item on the menu at White Castle, right? Is there a new item on the menu at White Castle? No, but I can dream, can't I? Actually, they keep putting in foo-foo things at White Castle. What was the last thing I saw? Something about, okay, please imagine an onion rings.

However, instead of onions, chicken. So, yes, I know, I see the look on your face. So like chicken nuggets? No, no, no.

See, that's a nugget. No, it's an onion. Like chicken strips? It was, it is.

See, I'm so horrified by this. I just can't, I can't focus very. No, it's, oh gosh, instead of an onion ring, it's a chicken ring.

How do they get the chickens to get into a circle? I'm sure that's a top secret of the kitchens of White Castle. Yeah, I can't, I can't tell you more. Well, maybe I can.

What's your security clearance? Probably not a high enough level to know how chickens become rings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Okay, we're just going to have to move on from here. Okay. So in the third half, we're going to be talking about ambiguous losses.

And I guess since Charlie's already, you know, spoiled the discussion about White Castles. What? Was there anything else? Again, it's just due to security clearance. Oh, you know what? No, tell me.

What did you tell us about today's recipe? So our funeral lunch recipe is feta dip. Is it feta or feta? Feta. Ready? All right.

Our funeral lunch recipe is feta dip, smoothed out with yogurt and a heap of soft herbs, turning it into a funeral lunch offering that's light, fluffy, and very green. Think of this as a cross between whipped feta and a herby yogurt sauce. It's bright.

It's tangy. It's endlessly snackable. Bon appetit.

All right. Our topics today cover closure and ambiguous loss. Now, Matthew Thomas's book, We Are Not Ourselves, takes the reader through the changes in one family and Ed's slow development of Alzheimer's disease.

In this excerpt, Ed's wife, Eileen, is reflecting on what she thought she wanted in life and how goals change as circumstances change. There had been times she'd wanted to kill Ed. Now that he has declined so quickly, she just wanted him home until Christmas.

It shocked her that her goals had dwindled to one, but that was all she could focus on, even now, eight months away from the holiday. Once he'd left, she knew he was never coming back. They used to have so many goals.

They made a list at one point, learn some Gaelic together, visit the wineries in Napa Valley. She couldn't remember what else was on the list. They hadn't accomplished any of them.

They hadn't finished the house. Much of the first floor looked new and appealing, but a good deal of the second floor was dilapidated and run down. She hadn't gone back for a doctorate.

She hadn't learned to play better tennis. She hadn't taken another trip to Europe. They might never take another trip anywhere.

They didn't need to go anywhere anymore, though. If she could get him to Christmas, she could take, without complaint, whatever was coming. A proper send-off was all she asked, surrounded by the regular crowd on Christmas Eve.

The kitchen, the beating heart of the house, full to bursting. At midnight, no one would have left. Smiling Ed in his suit on the couch would be incident-free.

Then mass in the morning, then a short drive to someone else's house, some coffee cake, and a modest second round of gifts. Then let it come down. She didn't need the whole day.

Let him have a fit at four o'clock. Let him be raving and dangerous and inconsolable. She'd drive him over to the home herself.

She always hated Christmas night anyway. It was the loneliest night of the year. Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program.

This is the part where we ask you for your financial support. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can continue to be accessible to everyone. You can donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's E-V-E-R-Y, the number one, dies.org. Or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies.

Charlie? Thanks, Marianne. In our second half, when difficult things happen, for example, getting ghosted, being fired, losing a parent, we want to know why or how did this happen. What will it take to feel better again? In short, we seek closure.

Experts say that closure may help some people heal. Ari W. Kruglansky, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, states that a resolution can make it easier to transcend that particular event and move on to other things. But is closure always necessary? And is it always possible? Dr. Kruglansky and other experts say the concept can be both useful and harmful.

So what is closure? Psychologists say closure to describe the feeling of having finished or concluded something. Dr. Kruglansky says it's a psychological mechanism that tells you, I have enough information, now I can form a decision. But, he added, not everyone has the same need for such certainty.

Decades ago, he developed a scale for assessing the need for cognitive closure. His research showed that people with a higher need for closure had strong opinions and usually made decisions quickly. The downside, however, is that it can also result in closed-mindedness.

People with less need for closure had more trouble making decisions and were more open-minded. Research suggests that circumstances and life history can make us crave closure more than we normally would. Someone who grew up with abusive parents, for example, might fear the unknown because they had negative experiences with uncertain situations in their childhood, Dr. Kruglansky said.

People might also seek closure when they lack confidence in the future, when they are in a time crunch or when they feel exhausted. So, is closure a good thing? Well, it can be. Seeking closure can help people arrive at decisions and make sense of difficult circumstances.

Psychology professor Dan P. McAdams at Northwestern University studies how people tell their own life stories and how this creates meaning for them. His research of the middle age found that people who are flourishing are more likely to tell redemptive stories about negative events from their past, a form of closure, than those who are struggling. For example, instead of thinking about a difficult divorce, they might accept the narrative that leaving their ex allowed them to find someone who was a better match.

But sometimes there is no happy ending or useful answer. Nancy Burns, a professor of sociology at Drake University and the author of Closure, the Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, knows this intimately. After her first child was stillborn, she received a sympathy card that said, Someday, this will just be a memory.

She found little comfort in that message. She states, My reaction was that I don't want it to be just a memory. This is still my child.

The idea of closure can appeal to us with the promise of ending our pain, she said. But in her view, we need space for both joy and grief because they are sometimes intertwined. With that in mind, can you ever really get closure? Sometimes.

Let's say you're waiting for a test result and your doctor tells you you don't have cancer. Now, you have closure. Unfortunately, reality doesn't usually provide simple answers.

Take ambiguous loss. A family member with dementia, addiction, or a traumatic brain injury might be physically present but psychologically absent, which brings grief but not closure. Or a family might be coping with the death of a relative whose body was never found.

Sometimes the closure we seek does not have the outcome we expected. For example, you might long for answers from a person who refuses to talk to you. If they ever agree to offer an explanation, it could make you feel worse.

Closure does not necessarily feel good, Dr. Kruglansky said. A satisfying resolution isn't tied to what someone else does or says. It depends on whether you accept the information you've learned and also trust the source of that information.

Only then is it truly closure. Professor McAdams observes that while coming to a decision or reaching a conclusion can be helpful, closure often implies a finality that may not be realistic. He suggested thinking about closure as a temporary resolution rather than something permanent, stating, Life changes, and sometimes you revisit issues that you thought were resolved.

I think there's got to be a certain kind of openness, even as you get older. Marianne, your thoughts on this? You know what I'm thinking about is, you know how you watch films when you're younger and you think that you know what they're about? And then you watch them when you're older and you say, I didn't know this film was about that. And it's the same film.

The only thing that's different is you and your life experiences. And I think maybe closure is that way too, is that you think, you know, at one age or at one point in your life that, okay, I understand this. I understand why this happened or that happened and I can make peace with it.

And then time marches on and, you know, if you're kind of, you know, reflect on things or as I'm accused of is I overthink things is I go back and I think about, well, now from this point of view, you know, is my perception accurate? I mean, it was accurate at the time, but with the advantage of time and learning and aging and other experiences, is it the same? And I find that it's often not the same. That I have a different insight into it because I guess maybe I have more information or different information than I had when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Or 50 or 60.

Go on. That's as far as I can go right now. Do you find that? Oh, very much so.

Just in, sometimes with people I haven't seen in a while and either I, for some reason, we just wouldn't regularly keep in touch. And now, you know, I run into them and I understand why I did not keep in touch. It was just, it was no connection, but I didn't understand why there was no connection.

And like you, sometimes I overthink. Yeah, there was nothing to think about. There was no real connection there and I didn't need that, you know, Catholic upbringing, like guilt thing that I still occasionally feel like, oh, but you should be polite.

Well, yeah, polite, but, you know, you don't need to sit around and have a drink with someone. Yeah, and also, as you mentioned, with movies, did you ever see The Man Who Would Be King? Man, I don't remember it, but it seems like I probably did. We're going back to the 70s.

Yeah, I was going to say it was a long time ago. Yeah, so I saw it when it came out. I know I saw it again and I didn't quite get it all.

And I saw it all and I saw it again sometime in the 80s. This film stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine as a couple of ne'er-do-wells who just decide they are going to loot a kingdom, you know, in the Middle East. And Christopher Plummer plays Rudyard Kipling.

And this is a story he wrote. So I started watching it last night. And really, I have not seen it since the 80s.

And suddenly, it just all, I don't know, it just all fell into place. Yes, so to your point, that. And there's also been times with people, you know, who had been casual acquaintances.

And just the opposite of what I said earlier, casual acquaintances, we, you know, we meet again, and it's just, I don't know, it's a different level. We become good friends. Yeah, it's, you just got to leave yourself open to it.

And I think also be open to going back and revisiting, like. Oh, yes. You know, and not say, oh, I saw that movie back when it first came out.

And it's, part of me is there's things that I want to see now. And do I really have time to go back and watch things that I've already seen? The other is that I've learned that even though I've already seen it, it's going to be a completely different movie because I have a completely different set of eyes. And so it's worthwhile, I think, to, you know, go back and revisit films and books that you, it's a whole new experience because you have sort of a different lens that you're looking through.

And I think closure can be that way too, or lack of closure. You can say, you know, back at one point, I really wanted to know why. And maybe at this point, it's like, I don't really need that anymore.

I've moved on. It's not as important as I thought it was at the time. Because at the time, it was important to me.

But now, you know, I got, as they say, other fish to fry. Yes. And it will fluctuate with the closure.

Yeah. It's funny because, well, funny for two reasons. I re-saw the Marx Brothers film Coconut.

I don't know how many times I've seen it. You must have seen it a hundred times. I just fell off the chair.

It's just so funny. Because you're weak and old? Yeah, I'm sure that's it. And hit you with my cane.

Yeah. And also, to that point, as, you know, long-time listeners know, my son was, you know, Michael was killed many years ago. It's strange.

I had a dream of him last night. And he was, yeah, this is strange. Actually, his mother was in it too.

But it was just Michael was there, you know, this trapping young lad he was. It was peaceful, but he was just quiet. And I woke up with that.

And just, you know, laid in bed for a while. It was nice to see him. Mm-hmm.

I wish it would have been interaction in my dream. But it was just nice to see him. Was it comforting that he was peaceful? Because he wasn't always peaceful.

No, he wasn't. He didn't seem, you know, like, you know, completely peaceful. It was okay.

I mean, there are dreams I've had with, you know, of him. And I told you, I mean, a long time ago, there was one where he is with my mother. Mm-hmm.

In a village, which to me looked like Mexico. And they were just enjoying each other's company so much. I felt privileged, something beyond privileged to just be standing there watching the two.

It was just very sweet. That wasn't there last night. He was, I don't know, I'm just glad I saw him.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, to your point, yeah, closure, you know, fluctuates.

And I don't know, honestly, if it's possible to have closure with, you know, violent death of a child. Oh, yeah, I agree, yeah, yes. But the fact that he seemed peaceful or was on the way to peaceful kind of makes me feel good.

I mean, you know, he's not my kid, but, you know, I've known him since he was born. And that seems to me that that would be very comforting that, you know, that he could be kind of at peace with you and Kim and together, you know? Yes. Yeah, it was a very nice moment.

Okay. Thank you. In Charlie's piece about closure, he mentioned ambiguous loss, which is an unclear loss that can be physical or psychological, and it has no resolution.

Ambiguous loss is grief over losses whose nature was uncertain, such as wives of fighter pilots who were missing in action during the Vietnam War. And the people that Boss studied, the researcher who really coined the term ambiguous loss, loss lacks certainty. There were often no bodies and no rituals for mourning.

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. Could such experiences even be considered losses? Dr. Pauline Boss has studied for 50 years observing how families spoke about their missing relatives and coined this term ambiguous loss to define the unclear and often unacknowledged absence in their lives. It can take many forms, often unremarkable.

An alcoholic parent who, when inebriated, becomes a different person. A divorced partner with whom your relationship is broken but not erased. A loved one with whom you've lost contact through deportation or a child you've given up for adoption.

These experiences are an accumulation of heartbreaks that we cannot always recognize. In a time when global community is contending with questions of atmospheric grief, she has broadened her attention beyond the family, looking at questions of societal bereavement. Do urgent social and political issues, such as the loss of society as we know it as a result of political change, be understood within her theory? This reflects ambiguous loss, growing influence and breadth as a tool to understand why and how we grieve.

In trying to describe losses that society doesn't always recognize, Boss might be helping us to rethink the nature of loss altogether. Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies and thank you for listening. You can find more podcasts about our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or your favorite podcast app.

Follow and subscribe to the show, share it with someone who needs a little hope today. This is Charlie Neverett and from Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect. And I'm Marianne Matzo and we'll see you next week.

Remember, every day is a gift. care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.