Ambiguous Loss

I recently finished reading a book called "Ambiguous Loss - learning to live with unresolved grief" by Pauline Boss. It dealt with the grieving and coping process in situations like children who disappear, men lost in war, and people with alzheimers. In these cases a person may be physically gone but still have a presence in the family because there was never a body, never any closure. In the case of alzheimer's, the person is physically present but already gone. These are obvious, gross examples, but the principals also apply to more subtle versions of being physically gone and yet present, or physically present yet gone. Ambiguity makes everything so much harder to deal with because things drag on without resolution and one doesn't know what to do or how to move on and recover. Lots of issues can fall under this pall of ambiguity.