"The Companioning Model of grief care reminds us that our helping role is not to 'fix what is broken,' but instead to 'nurture what is best.'" ~ Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt

We all know that caregiving can be complicated. Even our feelings can be ambiguous and hard to understand. This is known as ambiguous loss – a type of grief where a person experiences the loss of someone who is still physically present but emotionally or cognitively absent, such as in situations like dementia, brain injury, or mental illness. If caregivers don’t acknowledge and process this unique grief, it can lead to burnout, emotional exhaustion, and resentment.

I wasn’t aware of this type of grief journey until our son’s accident, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury and permanent brain damage. I have now come to realize that it is a very common form of loss, and many caregivers struggle with it because it lacks closure or clear resolution, making it difficult to fully grieve or heal.

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“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot.” – Jamie Anderson

We experienced an unusual spectacle in northeast Ohio and many other parts of the country this week as people came together to celebrate a few minutes of darkness in the middle of the day during the total solar eclipse. While the idea of an eclipse can be used to symbolize many things, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a perfect metaphor for our topic this week – grief and loss. 

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