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No Closure: Families of Missing Face 'Worst Kind of Loss'
Grieving the Unknown: Families of the Missing Face Painful Limbo
We
don’t know what happened to the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, which
throws the families of the passengers of Flight 370 into a kind of
painful in-between: Their loved ones aren’t here. But they’re also not
certainly dead. They’re just … gone.
In
the five days since the plane disappeared, these loved ones have been
in anguished limbo — a state known as "ambiguous loss," coined by
psychologist and author Pauline Boss.
“That is, when somebody
is missing or has vanished without a trace, and you don’t know their
fate, or the whereabouts of their body, and whether they’re dead or
alive,” Boss says. “So it becomes so uncanny, and strange, for the
families; they’re never quite sure if the person is truly dead.”
It’s
a feeling that can apply to dozens of experiences, like losing a
pregnancy, or losing a family member, small pieces at a time, to
Alzheimer’s or dementia. And it also applies to the families of the
missing: missing children, missing persons, or soldiers missing in
action.
“It is the worst kind of
loss to process — I don’t mean to say one kind of loss is worse than
another. But this is the kind of loss that creates suffering without
closure,” Boss said. “There is no closure, ever, if bodies can’t be
found.”
One afternoon in Omaha,
Kelly Murphy’s 19-year-old son, Jason Jolkowski, left their home to head
to work. His little brother saw him leave the house, and neighbors saw
him walking to his old high school, where a co-worker planned to meet
him in order to give him a ride.
“And
that was the last anyone ever saw him,” says Murphy. “He literally just
disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s been 12 years and we really
don’t know anything more than we did on day one.” She says that
usually, families in this situation have something to work with: a
violent boyfriend, an estranged parent, a missing jetliner. “But this
one, there’s just absolutely nothing. And that makes it harder; you have
nothing to go on.”
"You go through partial stages of grief but you can’t go through all the stages. You don’t know what you’re grieving for."
Part
of the reason that ambiguous loss might be so taxing on a person is the
fact that our brains crave information. Some scientists have posed the
theory that humans are, innately, information-seeking creatures; we need
answers, we need closure and we need an ending. “It becomes a problem
of cognition. It’s actually difficult for the brain to process this loss
because there is no information about it,” Boss says.
“You go through partial
stages of grief but you can’t go through all the stages. You don’t know
what you’re grieving for,” Murphy says. She’s been reading the stories
of the families of the Malaysia Airlines passengers calling their loved
ones’ cell phones; in the days and weeks after Jason disappeared, she
did the same thing with Jason’s phone.
“So
I can relate to what they’re going through. You want to cling to hope,”
Murphy says. “But as the days pass, I’m sure that, in their logical
minds, they know, this doesn’t look good. What I hope for them is that
they find some answers that give them some sort of peace.”
Because
after a death, there are a prescribed set of rituals, according to your
culture: throwing a handful of dirt on the coffin, or spreading the
ashes in a favorite place of the deceased. All of these rituals have a
purpose, helping the person process the grief. But with the missing —
when a person is simply, mysteriously gone — the people left behind are
helpless. Any ritual or burial or memorial has to be purely symbolic.
This was Sue Scott’s life for 45 years, since Dec. 30, 1969, when her brother’s plane went missing in Laos.
“Even
though the flame of hope is so minute after so many years, you never
quite give that up,” Scott said. “I think you’re always hoping for them
to walk through the door. I don’t think that ever goes away. Some
miracle will happen and they will walk through the door.”
Little bits of
information trickled in over the last four decades about Captain Doug
Ferguson: Investigators found his crash site. They learned that he died
holding off the enemy, while two pilots were rescued. Later, they found
pieces of his plane. And then, confirmed just last week — they found him. Ferguson’s remains were finally found and identified, Scott said.
“Many
had said that it was really gut-wrenching. So I didn’t know what to
expect,” Scott said of when she heard the news last week. “But,
actually, I felt a sense of peace as a result.
“For
me, in some sense, it was a sense of relief, to finally be able to move
forward. And I don’t mean ‘get on with my life.’ What I mean is to
celebrate his life,” Scott said.
Scott
got her answer, and Captain Doug Ferguson will finally be coming home
to Tacoma, Wash., on May 1, to be buried. Her story has a concrete
ending.
Murphy’s, after more
than a decade, still doesn’t. So she’s learned to “live in the
not-knowing,” as she calls it. It’s not something she’ll ever “get
over,” and she’s not interested in that, anyway. She’s channeled her
grief over Jason’s disappearance into the formation of Project Jason, a nonprofit that provides support for missing persons.
“They
will grieve off and on for the rest of their lives, and this is
normal,” Boss says. “There is no closure on ambiguous loss, and we need
to acknowledge that. It’s OK to not get over it; that’s OK even with an
ordinary death.”
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