When Ambiguous Loss Becomes Ambiguous Grief: Clinical Work with Bereaved Dementia Caregivers

Abstract

The experience of caring for someone with dementia can be heartbreaking. The losses inherent to caregiving itself can be difficult to reconcile after the death of a person with dementia, causing challenges in the bereavement stage. Although there is often significant social support to help people process the death of someone close to them, clinicians can struggle to help bereaved dementia caregivers integrate their ambiguous losses from caregiving, such as loss of roles, functions, and relationships, into a postdeath bereavement process. Many socioeconomic, personality, and family functioning factors impact an individual caregiver's experience, and there are more global influences from the nature of dementia caregiving itself that must be understood to best support a caregiver. Using the lens of the dementia grief model and examples from a case study, this article seeks to illustrate the dynamics inherent in integrating ambiguous losses following the death of a person from dementia, and it proposes clinical goals for working effectively with this population.

Keywords: ambiguous loss; bereavement; caregiving; dementia; grief.