Ed note: I listened to this article today on “The Daily”–a New York Times free podcast. I’ve always felt that the linear notion of resolving grief is overstated as is the idea of closure. Pauline Boss writes that grief takes many forms: for example, dealing with aging, caregiving, loss, COVID, etc. She challenges the ideas of Freud and Kubler-Ross. Can we ever say grief is “over?”
By Meg Bernhard
- Published Dec. 15, 2021 Updated Dec. 19, 2021
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When I first visited Pauline Boss in late May, Minneapolis was on the cusp of fully reopening. Boss, who is 87, greeted me in her building’s lobby wearing thick-framed glasses, her light blonde hair short and an Apple Watch clasped on her left wrist. She cautiously extended a hand toward me. “Can we shake hands?” she asked, smiling. “Dare we?” We did.
The apartment was bright, with two walls of windows pouring sky into the space. Bookshelves were filled with works of sociology, psychology and history; a section was devoted primarily to Sigmund Freud, and another to Boss’s hometown, New Glarus, Wis. Out the window, the Mississippi River churned under bridges, past the tangle of downtown.
The view, however spectacular, was not the apartment’s selling point. The elevators were. Boss, an emeritus professor of family social science — the study of families and close relationships — chose the place seven years ago because her husband’s declining health had made it difficult for him to climb the stairs of their house near the University of Minnesota, where she taught. His decline was gradual. In 2000, he was using a cane; by last year, when he was 88, rheumatoid arthritis had rendered him unable to walk. Vascular issues resulted in open wounds on his legs.
Despite his illness, the couple maintained a semblance of normalcy, entertaining guests, going for drives and attending the theater, until last year, when the pandemic isolated them in the apartment. Then, their only visitors were home health aides; once they left, Boss would take care of her husband, changing the dressing on his bandages and administering his medications.
“It sneaks up on you,” Boss said of the burden of caregiving and its attendant emotional struggles. She felt a range of contradictory feelings: gratitude for their time together, grief over the loss of their old rhythms and anxiety at the inevitability of his death. Boss was also confused about her role in their partnership. Once solely his wife, she was now also his caregiver.
With her husband’s drawn-out illness, Boss’s life came to resemble the cases she’d spent her career studying. Nearly 50 years ago, as a doctoral student in child development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researched families with at least one member who was either physically or psychologically absent. Her initial studies in the 1970s focused on families in which fathers were too busy working to spend time with their children, and later on the wives of fighter pilots who were missing in action during the Vietnam War. The fathers were psychologically absent but physically present, while the fighter pilots were the reverse. Each situation created a sensation of limbo for family members, a lingering sense of grief over losses whose nature was uncertain.