Graduate student Tai Mendenhall and Professor Pauline Boss. —Photo by Tom Foley

Professor Pauline Boss and two students in the Marriage and Family Therapy Program (Department of Family Social Science) were among the first to fly after the September 11 flight ban was lifted. Their destination was lower Manhattan, and they were responding to a call for help that would draw on their expertise in family stress and “ambiguous loss,” the term Boss uses to describe the unresolved grief that comes when no clear verification of death is available. Boss has studied ambiguous loss for 25 years.

“With ambiguous loss, you are the one who has to decide when your loved one is dead, but without the physical evidence this is very difficult to do,” says Boss. “People need some meaning to explain what happened. With the World Trade Center disaster, the enormity of the loss goes far beyond our ability to explain.”

Boss had received the call for help from Mike Fishman, president of the Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ, which represents 3,000 employees who worked in the World Trade Center. Fishman heard about Boss through his wife, who had been Boss’s student 20 years ago, and knew about her work on ambiguous loss. He asked Boss to come to New York to assist the therapists providing mental health services to the union members and families affected by the tragedy.

Boss quickly enlisted the help of faculty members William Turner and Liz Wieling and six graduate students. She and Ph.D. students Christi McGeorge and Tai Mendenhall left on September 16. Other teams have gone back every few weeks to continue the work.

But funds for travel were also needed on short notice. Fortunately, the department had a strategic initiatives fund, built largely with small gifts from alumni and others, that could be used. “An unrestricted funding source is essential when things come up that require you to act quickly,” says Hal Grotevant, the department chair. “The opportunity for our faculty and
students to take part in such a momentous effort is exactly what the fund was designed for.”

For the students, it has been a life-changing experience. “This experience shaped me as a person and as a therapist,” says McGeorge. “The sheer magnitude of the grief, the number of people needing help, and the severity of the needs went far beyond what you would find in any other practical experience.”

Mendenhall, who is studying collaborative family health care, says, “All of my training was instantly made real.” He is researching how family stress interacts with biological, psychological, and social conditions, which are at extreme levels in New York. “People weren’t sleeping, they had constant headaches, and they couldn’t keep food down,” he says. “On top of that, they had tremendous anger and guilt.”

But Boss says they have also seen signs of recovery. “We have been able to help people begin to share their feelings and their stories about the ones who are lost,” she says. “A group of electricians and their families met with the families of men who didn’t make it out. The survivors began telling stories about the lost men, about how proud they were of their children, or about how many other lives they helped to save that day. This helped both the grieving families and the survivors.”

All those involved stressed that the steps toward healing may be very small and slow. “For example,” says McGeorge, “one man announced that he had been able to sleep for an hour and 45 minutes in one stretch, the longest since September 11. For people who hadn’t been eating or sleeping, this was a success.”