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.

Many of us are taught that if we work hard enough we’ll be able to get over our losses. The social scientist Pauline Boss sees it differently.