The Myth of Closure: Rethinking Grief and Loss

Grief is often framed as something to resolve, a wound that must heal so that life can move forward. The cultural language surrounding loss reflects this expectation—people (us) are told to find closure, to move on, to reach a point where pain no longer lingers. Closure, in its most dominant form, suggests finality, a clean break from the past, a psychological and emotional resolution that allows the bereaved to step fully into the future, unburdened. But is that expectation realistic? More importantly, is it even desirable?

While some may claim to have found closure after a significant loss, many others struggle with the pressure to achieve it. We may experience grief not as a process with a definitive endpoint but as an evolving reality that remains part of us, shaping our identity and deepening our understanding of love, mortality, and meaning. The expectation that grief must be completed often does more harm than good, placing an unnecessary burden on those who are grieving to conform to an ideal that may not reflect their, or our lived experience.

Psychology offers a necessary corrective to the assumption that grief must be resolved in order to heal. Depth Psychology does not treat grief as something to be overcome but as something that reshapes the inner world. As Bud Harris describes,

“Meeting our wounds means creating the interior space to hold the reality of our experiences—our hopes, joys, terrors, hurts, triumphs, and finally our strength.”i

Grief demands this kind of interior space—not as a disruption to be silenced, but as a reality to be honored and engaged. Rather than insisting on closure, Harris suggests that true transformation occurs when we accept the fullness of our emotional landscape, even the rage and sorrow that challenge our denials. Individuation, in this sense, does not erase grief but reorients us to it—allowing suffering to deepen wisdom, compassion, and resilience rather than diminish us. The freedom to move forward is not found in suppressing loss but in making space for its presence within us, recognizing that grief is not an endpoint but an integral part of the journey toward wholeness.

Similarly, Existential Psychology challenges the idea that loss is something to move past. Irvin Yalom emphasizes that grief is not just about mourning another but about facing one’s own mortality. As he observes,

“The death of someone close will, if the therapist persists, always lead to an increased death awareness. There are many components to grief—the sheer loss, the ambivalence and guilt, the disruption of a life plan—and all need to be thoroughly dealt with in treatment. But, as I stressed earlier, the death of another also brings one closer to facing one’s own death; and this part of the grief work is commonly omitted.”ii

Grief, then, is never just about the person who is gone; it is also about what their absence awakens in us. The loss of another disrupts not only our relational world but also our illusions of permanence, forcing us to confront the inescapable reality of finitude. Yalom challenges the tendency to treat grief as a process of external loss without recognizing its internal reverberations—how it shakes the foundations of our own existence. The search for closure, in this sense, is often an avoidance of deeper existential reckoning. Instead of simply healing from grief, we are called to engage with it as a confrontation with our own mortality, a process that cannot be rushed, resolved, or neatly packaged.

Sociology further reinforces this critique. Nancy Berns, in her book Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, observes how closure has been culturally constructed as an expectation, shaping the way grief is both experienced and judged. She writes:

Closure has emerged as a new way of talking about grief and loss, which has led to new expectations for those who are grieving.iii

Berns’ research exposes how the idea of closure has been commercialized and medicalized, fueling an entire industry of self-help books, therapy models, and legal narratives that promise individuals the ability to "move on."iv
The very phrase finding closure has become a cultural shorthand for emotional success—those who grieve in open-ended ways are often seen as stuck, as though they have failed in their grief work. But, as Berns herself discovered in her own personal loss, grief is rarely something that follows a predictable trajectory. It does not abide by a timeline, nor does it require a final chapter.

This is where Continuing Bonds Theory presents an alternative frameworkv. Studies in grief psychology have demonstrated that, rather than severing ties with those they have lost, people often maintain an ongoing relationship with their memory and presence. Whether through rituals of remembrance, storytelling, dreams, or deep inner dialogue, many find that grief does not diminish with time—it simply changes form. The idea that we must close the door on a relationship after death contradicts both psychological insight and the lived experience of those who grieve.

If closure is neither necessary nor truly attainable, how do we reframe the way we speak about grief? Language has power, and the way we discuss loss shapes the way people experience it. Instead of asking, Have you found closure?, we might ask, How has this loss changed you? How do you carry it now? Rather than urging people to let go, we might affirm that love and memory are not burdens to release but parts of a life that continues to unfold. In this reframing, grief is no longer something to complete, but something to be honored and lived with.

By situating Berns’ critique within a broader psychological and philosophical framework, we see that the search for closure is not just an unrealistic expectation—it is often a harmful one. The deeper work of grief is not about shutting a door but about learning to live with an open one, where love and loss, memory and longing, sorrow and resilience, remain part of the journey.

Rather than seeking closure as an end goal, we might instead cultivate a deeper capacity to hold grief as part of the human experience. Loss does not ask us to erase, but to integrate; it does not demand forgetting, but reshaping. When we embrace this, we move beyond the illusion of finality and into a space where memory, sorrow, and love can coexist—not as unresolved burdens, but as enduring companions on the journey of life.

Mark J. Chironna PhD




 i Harris, Bud. Becoming Whole: A Jungian Guide to Individuation, Daphne Publications, pp. 31-32, 2016, Kindle Edition.

ii  Yalom, Irvin D.. Existential Psychotherapy, New York: Basic Books, pp. 167-168, 1980, Kindle Edition.

iii  Berns, Nancy. Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What it Costs Us, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Preface, 2011, Kindle Edition.

iv  Ibid.

v  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07481187.2023.2223593#abstract

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