Ambiguous Loss and Diasporic Parenting w/ Shui-yin Sharon Yam (E225)

<p>Over the past few years, I’ve had to reckon with loss and grief that felt unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable. It’s something we’re all dealing with in different ways. When loved ones die, we know they’re dead. Everything that comes with that remains horrible, even maybe unbearable, but there is no ambiguity over the fact that a loss happened. That’s not the case with ambiguous loss, the reality that every loss does not hold the promise of anything like resolutions. Take people who were forcibly disappeared in war. Their loved ones just don’t know for sure that they’re dead. There have been cases of people thought to be disappeared actually coming back from the dead, as it were. When the Assad regime fell nearly 2 years ago, there were some Lebanese prisoners released that were ostensibly missing since the 80s. Loved ones of those disappeared just don’t know, and many end up expressing a sense of paralysis, as it time was frozen the day they disappeared, and never unfroze. Linear time stops making much sense. Has a year passed since the ‘death’? What if they’re still alive? Can one even live with that, or is one stuck. Ambiguous loss can also be more ‘mundane’, for lack of a better term. I’ve moved a lot these past few years. Ever since I left Lebanon in 2015, I’ve moved places and countries many times. Each move brings with it good and bad, and the bad can be a sense of loss that is both permanent and unsettled. In that, ambiguous loss is as universal as it gets. We just don’t usually have the terminology to understand it better. </p><p>So I had Shui-yin Sharon Yam on to talk about ambiguous loss. She is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, and a faculty affiliate of Gender and Women&#39;s Studies at the University of Kentucky<strong>. </strong>This was actually her suggestion. Yam is a returning guest of TFTT. She was on in 2022 to talk about “<a href="https://thefirethesetimes.com/2022/01/14/95-untellable-stories-reproductive-justice-amp-complicating-acts-of-advocacy-with-shui-yin-sharon-yam/" target="_blank"><u>Untellable Stories, Reproductive Justice &amp; Complicating Acts of Advocacy</u></a>” and before that in 2020 to talk about “<a href="https://thefirethesetimes.com/2020/09/11/46-hong-kong-disappearances-and-the-emotional-cost-of-disinformation/" target="_blank"><u>Hong Kong, Disappearances and the Emotional Cost of Disinformation</u></a>.”</p><p><strong>Sharon&#39;s Recommendations:</strong></p><p>Past Lives (Movie)</p><p>Way