I know what it means when some archaeologists write biographies for hundreds of human remains. In December last year, I heard a story about the archaeologists of Cambridge university, how they’d found a lot of mediaeval bones and how they’d written out lives for them. I heard they could tell how the people had looked and what the people had done because of what the medical reports suggested, but I heard something else too. I heard it in a smaller voice, the voice I hear when I too want to speak for the dead. It said that any information can be shaped into the answer you are looking for, when you really want the answer; and that a water detox sounds really good to a person with a parasite when they can’t have the doctor. Because something, regardless of how porous, is better than leaving the spot empty– particularly when you would do anything to make it full.
Some things cannot be settled. Some things can’t be resolved, and some people will never exist as full circles in your mind. It’s a difficult thing to hear because we aren’t often put in the place that forces us to hear it– that we cannot always have certain and satisfying conclusions. Instead, we will constantly be presented with ways to slip from underneath that– we will always know something if we don’t know everything, and that will always be good for manufacturing some sort of fix, albeit, inferior. Eventually though, the fact that some things end in discontentment is forced upon us, and at some point, we also come to know that a distinct sense of an ending is a privilege.
Five years ago, I went to an exhibition, and I met a woman called Jude. Jude was an ex-caseworker and I was a journalism undergrad. We were there to celebrate 25 years of ‘Missing People’– the UK charity that looks for people. There were paintings and drawings on the walls of the grey warehouse we’d come to, they were all portraits of people who others were still looking for. There were grieving loved ones and media people, and in the midst of it all, Jude, who had retired from looking for people who were missing agreed with me, that it was all worse than death,
“Because it’s not an ending.”
Among the artwork was a portrait of the exhibition organiser’s brother composed with a turquoise pencil, and next to that was an e-fit— a digital imagining of what Thomas Moore might look like then, 16 years after he had disappeared. Some falsified certainty is merely functional, not consoling, and some people could not fabricate a plausible ending even if they tried, and, so long as you are living with such an indistinct end, you have managed to find an end of some kind. Closure is a job, and closure is not the same as certainty, and that is where any sort of closure has to begin, when you are dealing with any kind of ambiguous loss.
‘Ambiguous loss’ is the concept Professor Pauline Boss coined when she was fighting for people without a precise sense of what had happened to them, and what they were feeling. It is for when loss is debatable– when something is irretrievable, but there is no proof of it, and so, what is needed to trigger a conclusion is less textbook, more unique and personal. Boss attached a map for what might be needed: six guidelines to real resolution– in the absence of external knowledge and visible borders. All consider the idea of being new, and leave little room for the old things. It is about building over, and leaving what is beneath unreconciled, reimagining your life, without finding ways to work in all that happened before. Simply, it is starting to edge forward, regardless of the shambolic look of the things that lay behind.
-Abbie