When Cody Delistraty lost his mother in 2014, he was surprised by the various ways that he, his brother and his father dealt with their grief. The journalist and speechwriter had expected his family’s experiences to be aligned, that there would be a, “homogeneity to grieving.” The differences led Delistraty to wonder whether loss was more complicated than advertised.
There was a European study that found a third of respondents are extremely worried about climate change. That’s a huge instance of ambiguous grief because there’s disappearance of species and landscapes, there’s an increase in climate refugees, but you can’t really point to a body in a casket and say this is what I’m grieving. Relationships are another big example. In the book, I went to breakup boot camp to explore losing a loved one outside of death. Friend breakups can be devastating.