In her new book, “The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change,” Pauline Boss considers what it means to reach “emotional closure” in a state of unnamable grief or ambiguous loss. Boss teases out how one can mourn something that cannot always be described. The pandemic has been rife with “ambiguous loss,” A sense of “frozen grief” pervades great swathes of the global community. Boss believes that by rethinking and lending language to the nature of loss, we might get closer to understanding it.

In nineteenth-century New England, it was held to be essential to whisper to beehives of a loved one’s death.

Some have regrets over unfinished business. For others, the end of an unhappy and complicated relationship just comes as a relief.