How Do You Grieve Someone Who’s Still Alive?
Ambiguous loss is the cruel paradox of estrangement—learning to hold love and grief for someone who is both here and gone.
Published with permission from Rachel Haack substack.
Living with Ambiguous Loss
In one of my groups, a mother sat with tears running down her face as she said, “I feel like my son has died, except he hasn’t. I know he’s out there. I’ve seen pictures of him on Instagram. But he won’t speak to me. Every morning I wake up and it’s the same—he is both gone and not gone. I don’t know how to live with this.”
Her words echoed what family therapist Pauline Boss first named as ambiguous loss—a kind of loss that has no clear ending, no closure, no way to fully let go. Boss has called it the most stressful kind of loss a human can experience because it suspends us in uncertainty. Unlike death, where rituals help us grieve and move forward, ambiguous loss leaves us stuck in what feels like a cruel paradox: they are gone, and yet they are here.
What Ambiguous Loss Does to Us
Mothers tell me the pain feels physical—like grief lodged in the chest or pressing down on the body. It is not just sadness but a looping torment:
Confusion – Should I keep hoping or should I let go?
Frozen grief – I can’t move forward because there’s no ending.
Rumination – I replay what happened, searching for the one thing I could do differently.
Anxiety – Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a text, or maybe I never will.
Hopelessness – This might never change, and I don’t know how to live with that.
When mothers ask me: “How do I fix this? How do I resolve the pain I feel?” I regretfully tell them: there is no tool for resolution. The nature of ambiguous loss is that it resists closure - there is no clarity. But what can be done—what must be done—is to learn to carry it, to grow a life big enough that the loss doesn’t consume everything.
When Reaching Out is Met With Silence
The mothers I work with are not passive in this loss. Many have reached out—again and again. They have written letters of amends. They have asked for dialogue. They have admitted their part in the conflict and pleaded for repair.
They go to therapy. They join groups like mine. They learn skills, examine their stories, and commit themselves to growth. And yet, too often, they are met with nothing. Silence. Ghosting. Unanswered messages.
Estrangement and distance is not something we should simply accept—especially when we have a part in the rupture. Efforts toward reconciliation matter. But reconciliation itself is not something one person can force, as so many mothers already know with heartbreaking clarity.
This is what makes ambiguous loss so unbearable: doing the work, carrying the humility, opening the door again and again—only to stand there with no one walking through.
The Both/And Space
Boss says the task of ambiguous loss is learning to live in the “both/and.” This is not easy. In fact, it is excruciating. But it’s also the only way forward:
I love my child, and I will love them day by day.
I am deeply wounded, and I will keep building resilience.
I hope things will change, and I accept that I cannot force it.
I can hold compassion for my child, and I can set boundaries to protect myself.
I can feel grief, and I can still allow joy to return.
I can carry love for my child, and I can carry anger too.
I can enjoy my life without them in it, and I can desperately wish they were in it.
This last paradox is one of the hardest for mothers to admit. They feel guilty even thinking it: How could I possibly enjoy life if my child is estranged? But love doesn’t mean erasing yourself. Love is large enough to hold joy and anguish side by side.
A Larger Life
I wish I could offer a guaranteed formula for reconciliation, a clear path to mending the rupture. But I can’t. What I can offer is a way of living with the unresolvable.
And if I’m honest, as I sit with mothers week after week, I sometimes carry a private fantasy: to find their children and ask them directly—How can you be so cruel? How can she sit here, week after week, learning skills, asking what she can change, begging for a way to reach you again—while you remain silent? Are you in a three-month course learning how to be a better son or daughter? Are you waking every day worried sick at the thought of never seeing your mother again? Why does this make sense?
That fantasy is born out of grief, and out of witnessing a mother’s relentless love. But the truth is, I cannot make her child see what I see. I cannot make them choose differently.
What I can do—and what these mothers do for one another—is keep growing life larger around the loss. They show up for each other’s pain. They plant gardens again. They plan trips. They relearn laughter. They build lives that hold space for love and sorrow together—not because they don’t love their children, but precisely because they do.
To live with ambiguous loss is to accept the wound without letting it define the whole of your life. It is to keep the door unlocked for reconciliation, while also opening windows to let light and air back in.
A Word to Mothers Carrying This Loss
If you are reading this and carrying the weight of estrangement, I want you to hear me clearly: there is nothing wrong with you for feeling broken by this. You are grieving something that has no map, no rituals, and no name in most of our culture. Of course it feels unbearable.
You may wish for resolution, but the truth is that you can only do your work—the work of growing stronger, more compassionate, more grounded—even as you carry the wound of absence. You cannot do your child’s work for them. And you cannot force reconciliation.
But you can continue to live. You can choose to build a life that expands around the loss instead of collapsing under it. You can allow yourself to laugh again, to love again, to savor small joys, even as the ache remains.
You do not have to choose between love for your child and love for your own life. Both can live in you. Both must.
So today, let this be your practice:
I love my child.
I love my life.
I can hold both.
This is the practice of ambiguous loss—learning to hold what cannot be resolved, and still making a life that is larger than the wound.
✨ You don’t get over this. You grow around it. The loss stays, but so does your life.
This is helpful for those of us experiencing this loss... The most difficult part for me is that there were no risk factors in our home, my husband was and is a wonderful Father, but our son has been overcome by mental illness! I pray daily not just for our family but for everyone else going through this also!
I have experienced much of this. Meaning, the extreme loss, while being cut off from contact and now the return of contact- while minimal- at best. There still remains a feeling of loss. The child ( actually, young adult) who has re-entered my life is very different from the one who left. So, while I can sleep at night knowing my child is alive and- it’s hard to say “healthy “- because I don’t see it as healthy, there’s still a tremendous feeling of loss.
Loss of the closeness & friendship we once had, loss of fluid, unencumbered speech, loss of a mother and child connection. Dare I say it- a loss of trust. I poured my everything into keeping my child safe & trying to honor the blessing bestowed upon me by God. Now, my kid has chosen to endanger that life with hormones, future surgery, and a host of bad decisions. We’re not allowed to discuss the topic or contact will once again be lost. So, trivial things are discussed along with how work is going, how pets are doing, how other family members are doing….
Meanwhile, inside, all I want to do is discuss my kid’s need for therapy, the need for self love and healing.
So, my point in all of this is even when there is contact ambiguous grief remains.
To all of the parents going through this nightmare-
My heartfelt thoughts and prayers are with you.
❤️🙏🕊️