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In her new book, \u201cThe Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change,\u201d Pauline Boss considers what it means to reach \u201cemotional closure\u201d in a state of unnamable grief.\n\nHard to define, these grievances have been granted a new name: ambiguous loss. The death of a loved one, missing relatives, giving a child up for adoption, a lost friend \u2014 Boss teases out how one can mourn something that cannot always be described.\n\nThe pandemic has been rife with \u201cambiguous loss,\u201d Boss argues. Milestones missed; friendships and romantic liaisons cooled; families prevented from bidding farewell to dying loved ones because of stringent hospital rules. A sense of \u201cfrozen grief\u201d 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.