Grieving America: This Immigrant’s Ambiguous Loss

A free post

💥 This month’s free post is a deeply personal one. It’s about ambiguous loss, not the kind we face when someone dies, but the kind we feel when a belief, an identity, or a country begins to fracture.

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On Wednesday, I will continue with the Modern Loneliness series, available to my paid subscribers.

There’s a sense of unique grief that comes from experiencing a loss that is not of a person but of an idea, a story, a shared belief. I think we all feel it. Some more than others. But we all suffer in silence because we can’t put a finger on it. We can’t name it to explain it. It isolates us in our own private doldrums. It affects our relationships with everyone and everything. It diminishes hope for our individual and collective future.

In 1989, I celebrated my birthday on a train across Eastern Europe. Poland, Chechia as they called back then, East Germany. On November 9^th, I found myself swept through a noisy crowd in East Berlin. My instinct was to get away. I couldn’t find out what was happening because I didn’t speak German. The last thing I wanted was to get arrested by German police. I tried Russian. All Eastern Bloc kids had to learn Russian, as ordered by the USSR. But here in East Germany, all it got me was frowns, stare-downs, and directions to the wrong place across town.

On the momentous occasion of the Berlin Wall falling, I rode the wrong bus in the opposite direction. No one missed me, I am sure, and without cell phones back then, I couldn’t have taken a selfie. With or without me, it precipitated the dissolution of the USSR thirteen months later, and Mikhail Gorbachev resigned.

We grew up being told that capitalists were fascists. They exploited workers, keeping them impoverished. Communist propaganda depicted Americans as fat, pompous, entitled, and arrogant. They claimed the rule of law favored the rich and that America was a dangerous place for minorities. “Streets were full of destitute people begging for scraps,” they told us.

In reality, from the 1950s to about the mid-1980s, Americans enjoyed prosperity. Incomes rose. One person’s two annual salaries bought a house. The government was helping people attend school, start businesses, and raise children. We knew this because we listened to Radio Free Europe – a US-funded broadcasting station behind the Iron Curtain.

Most coveted for us was American freedom and democracy. We never had free and fair elections. Hardly anyone ever went to vote because there was usually only one candidate with a cardboard cutout as a second listed on the ballot, and somehow, 80% of the population always elected the same guy for over 30 years.

We couldn’t say what we thought of the government unless we wanted a free trip to a labor camp or to lose a job. Journalists attempting to report on government corruption lost their lives. Schools taught history invented by the communist regime, depicting the Russians as liberators in WW2.

If anyone dared to escape, the family left behind endured retaliation and repression.

As soon as the Iron Curtain cracked open, I slid out, bound for the land of the free and the home of the brave. In all honesty, I did not plan on staying. I wanted to see with my own eyes what I’ve been hearing from Radio Free Europe. But once I arrived with my tourist visa, I realized I had found my ideological home.

I signed up for college and changed my tourist visa to a student visa. Back then, American immigration law and process were easy enough for me to navigate without an attorney. I literally walked into the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) in Honolulu, Hawaii, and walked out an hour later after a short interview, getting my picture taken, and paying a $100 status-change fee with new paperwork and a new legal status – student. I was prepared, of course, with everything required, thanks to the International Students Counselor at school – a free service and support at the time.

Back then, America valued the international students it educated and made it easy for them to get work visas. So, here I am today, 35 years later, an immigrant from a third-world communist country and a US citizen, paying taxes from the first day I earned a dollar.

I could have never imagined that the tears of joy I felt when I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States would be replaced by the sorrow of watching it all break down right in front of my eyes, while some people think it’s making America great.

Ironically, the US is now pretty close to how communist propaganda depicted it back in the day. It’s not that communists were prophets. It’s that power corrupts, and people in power sooner or later stop pretending that they like democracy because democracy is the only check on their power.

The authoritarians-wanna-be of today have the playbooks of the authoritarians of the last 100 years to use along with more sophisticated technology. Like all those before them, they exploit social discontent born of the massive income and wealth inequality that has existed and grown since the mid-1980s, weaponizing it with promises of greatness that will never be possible if democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law are bent out of shape. They turn people’s ire laterally at fellow citizens instead of vertically at those who truly rob them of their future – the ultra-wealthy oligarchs who pay to play in a system that benefits them, mediated by unscrupulous politicians more interested in grifting than governing.

Once burned, twice shy, I'm watching from within the boiling pot in horror. Without “E Pluribus Unum,” the United States’ foundational principle adopted in 1782, “Out of many, one,” what will the future look like?

If the rule of law doesn’t hold here and now, if the most needed and least appreciated immigrants are treated like terrorists and excluded from Constitutional protections, if masked, secret police snatches racially-profiled people off the streets without identifying themselves, if the US military turns its weapons on civilians within its own borders, if elections are overturned under dubious accusations of fraud, where do Trump supporters think they will be living 10 years from now?

I’ll tell you where. They will be living, along with the rest of us, in what the communists of the 50s described America to be – a fascist, brutal, capitalist regime that has its massive economy benefiting only the top 5% of the population. In contrast, the rest of us will struggle to buy a house, educate our children, and get the healthcare we need in our old age. Retaliation will meet all of your civil rights and labor complaints. There will be personal economic consequences to your political criticism. You will feel the suffocating effect of mass surveillance sold to you as an anti-terror necessity, a la Patriot Act on steroids. You will not see another free and fair election in your lifetime. You will fear getting snatched from the street by a masked, unidentifiable “police” force because someone who didn’t like you told a lie to get you in trouble, but without your right to due process, no one cares about your innocence or defence.

That’s the price you’re willing to pay to own the libs?

Sadly, the rest of us will have to share your misfortune.

But I digress. Sort of.

I know that no Trump supporter will read this and say, “OMG. I didn’t realize this.” More likely, I’ll get some Trump talking points thrown at me like, “America is the hottest country right now.” Sure, it is. The Texas grid can barely keep up with A/C usage. If the idea here is to become Dubi, we are on the right track. We just need to give our ICE agents and the police some Lamborghinis.

Policy and political differences are nothing new in the United States. But lawmakers and politicians duked it out in debates, in the courts, and, for the most part, listened to their constituents. No matter which side of the political spectrum people lived on before, they always agreed on one shared truth: democracy is good, dictatorships are evil.

We are way past this now. And I am grieving. Ambiguously.

Ambiguous loss is a term coined by psychologist Pauline Boss to describe a type of grief that has no clear resolution. It’s the kind of loss that doesn’t offer closure because the thing or person lost is either:

Physically absent but psychologically present – like a missing person, an estranged loved one, or a parent who abandoned the family. Or, physically present but psychologically absent – like someone with dementia, addiction, severe mental illness, or someone emotionally shut down.

Boss developed the term in the 1970s while working with families of soldiers missing in action and later applied it to many contexts where people feel “stuck” in grief because there’s no clear ending, no funeral, no clean break.

However, it turns out that you can experience ambiguous loss when you lose a dream or identity you once held, such as a belief system, a sense of safety, a community, culture, or a country that has changed beyond recognition.

So, in my case… all of the above. I am pretty sure that I am not alone in this one.

What makes ambiguous loss particularly tricky is that it resists resolution. There’s no finality to metabolize.

We are in the middle of this shitstorm that keeps picking up speed and changing directions, hitting every truth we held as self-evident before – America is a nation of immigrants, politicians are accountable to the people, everyone has a right to due process, we don’t arrest political opponents, we shouldn’t start wars, we should stand up for the underdog and be a beacon for democracy, no one is above the law, the president is not a king, we don’t have a masked Gestapo.

I’ve lost my ideological home to a senile, elderly narcissist and his Project 2025 buddies who only care about money and self-gratification. At the same time, thanks to the Trump propaganda machine, half the population is living in a completely different reality, which makes the grief confusing. If your dog dies, your whole family and neighbors agree that it’s a terrible thing. When democracy is about to get decapitated, half your community thinks it’s a good thing because we need a strong man, even if he’s a convicted felon.

It’s painful to see how many people I know and love have come to believe that the collapse of democratic norms is acceptable. That cognitive and emotional gap between us has become harder to bridge, and that’s a quiet grief in itself.

The ambiguous loss creates a psychological background hum of sadness, confusion, and/or disconnection. I am an immigrant who idealized the U.S. as a place of justice, democracy, and opportunity, and now I feel betrayed. I feel that this country is not only politically divided but morally inverted. It’s become cool to be cruel, and now cruelty is the goal.

Next thing, Stephen Miller will want to scratch off The New Colossus inscribed on The Statue of Liberty because he doesn’t want the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to be free spoiling his white-washed landscape.

I used to be proud to be an American. Now, when I travel, I tell people that I am from California because it sounds less obnoxious and softens their disapproval. The way things are going, I’ll have to refer to myself as a Bulgarian again. It might be better to answer questions like, “Where the hell is Bulgaria?” than, “What the hell is wrong with you Americans?”

I am left in a state of limbo, torn between hope and despair, uncertain whether things will improve or collapse further. I am in disbelief that good friends voted for this madness and continue to support it.

And the most difficult question I wrestle with is this: “Where do I belong?”

I don’t know how this ends. None of us do. But I do know that naming the grief, rather than numbing it, is a radical act in a culture that wants us distracted and divided. If this place is worth mourning, maybe it’s also worth defending, not just politically, but through presence, storytelling, and staying human in the face of dehumanization. That’s how we resist becoming what we fear. That’s how we remember who we are. Even now, even still.

Maybe ambiguous loss doesn’t mean ambiguous hope. Maybe it just means the hope has changed shape. I can’t unknow what I’ve seen. But I can still choose to speak, to stay engaged, to keep believing that the truth matters, even if the story has fractured. I’ve seen the authoritarian regimes of my teenage years fall apart slowly at first and then overnight. I know that pissed-off people in survival mode possess massive power. Recently, we saw Syria overthrow Bashar al-Assad.

If we all put down the remote controls and start speaking loudly, in person, to our representatives, on the streets, through our channels, and everywhere, perhaps we can create a soundwave tsunami that will be impossible to silence and ignore. The Republican members of Congress will have no choice but to grow a pair and do their job instead of complicitly watching the show.

I hope.

Thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting Life Intelligence.

Val.