Fishermen Wellness: Ambiguous Loss
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- 3 hours ago
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When the Sea Keeps Them: Understanding Ambiguous Loss for Fishermen Lost
at Sea
By Annie Sokoloski
The sea is both a provider and a taker. In fishing towns, this truth is not just a saying it’s
a lived reality. For generations, families have sent loved ones out beyond the harbor,
trusting skill, faith, and the shifting mercy of the ocean to bring them home. Most days,
they do. Some days, they don’t. And sometimes, the sea keeps them forever.
When a fisherman is lost at sea, grief takes a complicated shape. There is no body to
lay to rest, no final moment to mark the passage from life to death. The boat is gone, or
perhaps pieces wash ashore, but the man—or woman—is nowhere. Hope lingers in the
corners of the mind, whispering maybe… even as reason begins to answer no. This is
ambiguous loss.
What Is Ambiguous Loss?
Psychologist Pauline Boss describes ambiguous loss as a grief without closure—when
a person is physically absent but remains psychologically present. It’s different from
death with a body present, where final rituals allow for goodbyes. With ambiguous loss,
the mind struggles to accept reality because there is no tangible proof, only unanswered
questions.
For fishing families, ambiguous loss often arrives on the back of a storm, an engine
failure, or a sudden shift in weather. The Coast Guard search may end, the radio may
go silent, but the heart doesn’t receive an official notice. You’re left in a suspended
state—half in mourning, half still waiting for the sound of boots on the dock.
The Maritime Heart of Grief
Fishing communities understand this limbo. They’ve lived it before, and they will live it
again. The sea can be generous—feeding, sustaining, and binding a town together—but
it can also take without giving back. When it does, there is no gravesite to visit. The
memorial becomes the shoreline, the harbor, the tide itself.
This absence echoes far beyond the family. In a small town, everyone knows the lost
crew, their children, the boat’s paint color, the sound of its engine when it headed out
before dawn. The loss ripples through the wharf, the coffee shop, the bait shed—felt in
ways that are spoken and unspoken.
Living With the Unanswered
Ambiguous loss asks the hardest thing of us: to live without the answer we want. There
is no moment where you can say now I know for certain. Instead, you learn to carry the
absence alongside the love. You speak their name without fear of making others
uncomfortable. You keep their coffee cup on the shelf, not as denial, but as
remembrance.
Communities create rituals to help with this weight. Annual bell-tolling ceremonies,
plaques on memorial walls, and wreaths cast into the current give shape to the grief.
These acts do not close the wound, but they give it a place to breathe.
Why We Keep Remembering
To remember is not to stay stuck in sorrow—it is to keep the person present in the story
of the community. Each fisherman lost to the sea is part of the living history of their
harbor. Their names become part of the tide, spoken by those who knew them and
taught to the next generation who never did.
We cannot take the sea’s power to keep them, but we can refuse to let them vanish
from our hearts. As long as the boats leave the dock and the nets hit the water, we will
honor those who never returned—standing at the edge of the shore, where love meets
the horizon.
Annie Sokoloski works in global procurement with SOGELCO International Inc., a seafood
company with deep ties to Atlantic fisheries. Raised in Lubec, Maine, and Campobello Island,
New Brunswick, she later survived multiple brain aneurysms, giving her a deep understanding of
ambiguous loss. A certified yoga teacher, Annie trains with the Veterans Yoga Project and
LoveYourBrain Foundation, and is active with the Lost Fishermen’s Memorial in Lubec, Maine.
Resources
National Council on Family Relations resource hub
Dr. Mark’s Ambiguous Loss session
The Grief Center webinar
Ambiguous Loss Support Group (Facebook)
Mayo Clinic coping guide
Veterans Yoga Project
