Grief is simply the outcome of loss, but the criterion for what you lost is that you were attached to it. You can grieve things that are both clear and unclear... But there are many kinds of losses that remain ambiguous. It's a term I came up with in the late 1970s that apparently gave a name to a kind of loss that heretofore went unacknowledged. People felt sad; they felt like they wanted to grieve, but nobody would come to their house to comfort them; there were no religious rituals for this kind of loss.
Now we know there is such thing as ambiguous loss, and I think that's what people might be experiencing now. During the COVID pandemic, for example, we had loss of trust in the world as a safe place because of the virus. Many of us baked bread because that was a couple hours of being in control again and having a good outcome. It was certainty, two hours of certainty—that, by the way, is a good way to cope with grief.
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