So, I have not prepared my questions. I just want to settle into talk with you for 20, 30 minutes.

And, you know, we are putting the show that we did a few years ago, which really lays out the notion of ambiguous laws, the myth of closure.

But what I want to just reflect on with you this morning very directly is, what does ambiguous loss mean in a global pandemic?

Well, it means essentially the same thing that it meant on the individual and family level, but suddenly it has this global meaning, which I never intended until this phone started bringing, so to speak, the emails came in with the pandemic saying, isn't this ambiguous loss.

So, as a theoretician, I was delighted that people, journalists and ordinary people put it together. That's a dream that an academic wants is that whatever you do is useful to the general public.

But then I began thinking, of course, it's ambiguous loss, but it's more abstract. And it's beyond the individual or family now. It has been raised to a higher level.

Right.

To help us make sense of this nonsensical thing that's going on, this invisible enemy.

So, we're kind of going through a global civilizational moment of ambiguous loss at a societal level.

Yes. We have lost, indeed. We have lost our freedom to go about our days. We always have.

We have lost our freedom to visit with our loved ones award to have lunch with their friends. And I must say again, because the school thing is coming up.

The young people have lost not only a year, it may be two years of what they usually do is go to school in the usual manner, make friends, socialize, learn, learn.

And that generation will have to carry that the rest of their lives.

I'm finding personally and picking up in others. Obviously, this is not a scientific study I've done, but it feels to me and myself and in others.

I've kind of hit this moment. I don't know how many months we are now from March, but to May.

Certainly, but certainly in March and April and May, there was a sense that this will end.

This is something we have to do so that we can get through this. And even things that got canceled, got rescheduled for 1st July and then September, October.

And I feel like it's really settling in now. The losses. And they're large and small, as you say.

I mean, people have lost loved ones, but there's also this loss of going to the office of certainty like your kids will go to school.

I mean, my son didn't really graduate from college. Some of these things, people will bounce back from.

I actually really trust that our kids, who knows how this will affect them. It might be just transformative in generative ways that we can't imagine.

And yet, there are all these losses, large and small, all at once. And we're carrying them individually, but we're also carrying them at the same time.

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