The Myth of Closure

Source: Carol Smith

It’s been just over a month since at least 97 people lost their lives with the collapse of a condo tower in Surfside, Florida. Just a month, but that’s eons measured in both media attention span and our public tolerance for grieving. Already, the clamoring for “closure” has begun, promoted in soundbites on the evening news about how recovery efforts provided some measure of relief for victims’ families. But it’s also code for "time to move on."

It’s an all-too-familiar siren song for me, as both a working journalist and a bereaved mother. Catastrophic loss, murders, and horrible accidents have been staples in every newsroom where I’ve worked. The stories have a predictable arc, at least the way we cover them.

First, there is the shock of the incident. Then the reaction from the suddenly bereaved who have been yanked from their accustomed lives in horrific ways. Finally, there is the search for meaning to unpack what went wrong in the case of system failures, and eventually, memorials to the lives lost, along with proclamations about closure. I had an editor once who likened it to a form of theater. Everyone had their part to play, including the media, and part of our job was to present the story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Except, grief doesn’t work that way.

No end stop on grief

Closure as a concept is more often a way for people outside the story to vicariously exorcise the pain. There is closure, but it’s for the journalists covering the story, or the detectives who solved the case, or the other players in the tragedy who must return to their regular lives. They need closure to be able to move on to the next story, the next case, the next rescue. Grieving families, though, don’t get to move on, at least in the sense of “closing the door” on a story, or putting an end stop on their grief.

My son Christopher died on a bright New Year’s Eve morning 27 years ago. He was seven — a joyful, stubborn child, who was deaf, but seldom silent. His exuberant whoops and enthusiastic signing directed my attention to all the ordinary wonders of our world. I still think about him every day, sometimes with a kind of dizzy joy and gratitude that I got to love him for his seven years. I smile whenever my lawn blooms with dandelions. “Wind flowers,” he would sign to me before tugging me down to make a wish and blow. But sometimes an unexpected trigger — a friend calling with news that one of my son’s old playmates has gotten married, or the sight of children playing on a slide — and it hits me with the force of a building collapsing; it’s his ashes I’ve now scattered to the wind and no amount of wishing will bring him back.

A persistent myth

One reason closure is such a persistent myth is that people with old losses don’t tend to talk about them. Speaking of the dead makes people uncomfortable. They start to squirm and reach for awkward condolences: It will get better over time, they say, which sounds comforting, but the implication is that if it doesn’t, or if your pain loops back around again, you must be doing it all wrong. There is still a stigma in our culture around admitting that we’re sad. We reach instead for pain relief in all its many different forms. Talking about old grief will get you labeled as “stuck” or otherwise maladjusted. But not talking about it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Grief is not linear. There is no end of the line, no cut-off point. We don’t stop grieving on a schedule any more than we stop loving on one. I recently attended a conference for families who had lost children. I didn’t hear a single person speak of closure. “I hate that word,” said one mom, something I’ve heard echoed over and over in grief support rooms over the years.

That doesn’t mean that grief always looks or feels the same, only that it doesn’t vanish on command. Grief looks less like a series of stages than a Mobius strip, or the figure eight of an infinity loop. Traveling forward also brings you back to points along the way. Allowing yourself to feel the old pain when it comes, to let it wash through your body, is part of healing. When it courses through us, it also takes with it the toxic buildup of unexpressed grief. A growing body of research shows that grief that gets lodged in the body and ignored can have physical effects down the road, long-haul symptoms for the bereaved. Broken Heart Syndrome is a real thing.

Moving beyond closure

A few summers ago, I edited a series of stories exploring the first case solved with forensic genealogy to go to trial. There had been much made in the media at the time about how the arrest and trial of William Talbott II for the double murder of a young Canadian couple — Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg — was important to bring closure to the family. And, indeed, family members sometimes use this language, too, maybe partly as a defense against the enormity of what they sense lies ahead for them, or a belief that it will prompt action on the part of media and lawmakers. But when the klieg lights click off and the new crews disappear, they still find themselves alone, crashed on the rocks of despair, listening to the sirens sing.

Those of us in the media have a role in perpetuating the myth of closure, but we also have an opportunity to revise it. In missing-person cases, and murder investigations, and horrible accidents, we can stop labeling what families want or will get as closure and instead call it for what it is — answers. Families want to know what happened and why. They want their loved ones found. They want justice served. Those are all critical things, but not the same as closure.

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For the rest of us, there is one thing we can offer someone who is grieving and it’s not closure. It’s an open heart. It’s permission to grieve in their own time in their own way. The best kind of pain relief is being able to talk about a loved one who is lost, no matter how long it’s been.