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You could say of 2020 that we are suddenly in a world of ambiguous loss.

Pauline Boss coined this term and invented a new field within psychology

to name the reality that every loss does not hold a promise of anything like resolution.

In this year of pandemic, there are so many losses, many now just settling in,

from deaths that could not be mourned to the very structure of our days,

to a sudden crash of what felt like solid careers and plans and dreams.

When I spoke with Pauline Boss about her groundbreaking wisdom in 2016,

she illustrated it with ambiguous life changes like illness, divorce, and aging.

Those two are still happening right now. So we offer up this conversation,

a new, full of practical intelligence for shedding assumptions about how we should be feeling

and acting that actually deepened stress precisely in a moment like this.

We like to solve problems. We're not comfortable with unanswered questions,

and this is full of unanswered to questions. These are losses that are minus facts.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Beying.

Pauline Boss introduced ambiguous loss in her 1999 book of that title.

Now an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota,

she's called in for counsel by families, corporations, governments, and NGOs across the world,

including throughout this year's pandemic. She grew up in a first-generation Swiss American

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