I used to throw the word closure around with great confidence and little thought. I would talk about some experience of grief and say that the family found closure there. I began to get hints that the word closure was not giving folks much comfort. Matter of fact I soon discovered the word made some of them angry.

After the Oklahoma City bomber was found guilty in a Denver court room, the victim families were immediately engulfed in a sea of cameras, microphones and inane questions. The first words most of them said were, "Don't call this closure. This does not close anything for us." Their protest did very little good. The commentators droned on and on about how this would finally bring "closure" to this experience and help them "move on" in their grief. 

Grief has a million doors flung open and exposed to the raw realities of permanent loss. Every nook and cranny of our being is impacted. There is no one large door that can close or one final experience that can indicate we are now healed and the grief is over. Grief is not something that can be fixed. It is a wound that must be slowly healed. Each nook and cranny needs individual attention and care. It may seem like we can heal an area and be done with it, but the grieving is so interconnected that it is impossible to isolate and heal some part and it never hurt again. We hurt all over more than we hurt anywhere else. That may sound weird, but folks in grief can identify fully with the concept. 

While grief is all of one piece, there is a process involved and there is some kind of very broad pattern grief seems to follow. In that sense, it could be said that there are some small closures though I think there are much better words to describe the process. For example, there is a great deal of denial during the early days of grief. We seem to be in a daze of knowing but not knowing. Reality gradually dawns and, in that sense, we could say there was some closure to the denial part of our grieving. We are now dealing with reality. I think the better concept is to see grief as a whole and the movements within the experience as necessary passages on a long journey.

The word closure seems to trivialize our grief. As if it were some problem that is now solved and we should not be bothered anymore. Like paying off a loan at the bank, or closing a deal on a house. It makes grief a temporary problem instead of a life changing loss that cannot be recovered or fully cured. 

The word closure seems to take away permission to grieve. To a grieving heart it feels like someone is saying, "You were hurt, and now you are healed, so get on with your life." The freedom to grieve in openness and honesty is gone when friends and family think we have had this miraculous thing called closure and should not hurt any more. OH! That there really was such a thing.