Jerri Clark: Ambiguous Loss and When Mental Illness Steals Someone You Love

We sit with author Jerri Clark as he explains how severe mental illness can create a “gone but not gone” grief that families carry in silence. 

We talk about ambiguous loss, why closure often never comes, and how to keep living with love and meaning even when the outcome is out of our control. 

• Jerri’s story of losing his son through psychosis, system failures, and suicide 
• What ambiguous loss means and why the ambiguity is unfixable 
• The guilt families feel when they grieve someone still living 
• Naming the losses: relationship, future, safety, predictability 
• Coping as a nonlinear process that does not deliver resolution 
• Learning to live with grief without letting it become your only identity 
• “This is not my fault” as a practical starting point 
• Adjust mastery and revising attachment when you cannot control outcomes 
• What readers can expect from the book’s “do now” reflections and exercises 
• Why community, empathy, and support networks matter for healing 

If this kind of conversation matters to you, follow the show so you don't miss what comes next. 

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intro/outro music bed written by T. Wild
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Transcript

Why Autism and Mental Health Matters

0:00

What if everything you thought you knew about autism and mental health wasn't the full story? Today's conversation might change the way you see it. This is Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Real conversations about autism, mental health, and the stories that shape our lives. I'm Tony Mantor. This is where understanding begins. If this kind of conversation matters to you, follow the show so you don't miss what comes next.

Gone Before Gone And Triple Loss

0:26

Joining me today is Jerry Clark, author of Gone Before Gone, when mental illness steals someone you love. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thank you for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. I understand you have written a book. Can you give us a little information on it? I have just authored a book called Gone Before Gone: When Mental Illness Steals Someone You Love. And this book is an homage to my son Calvin, who died when he was 23 years old after a four-year struggle through the mental illness treatment system that was never built to rescue him. So I really lost my son three ways. I lost him when he was 19 to his first psychotic break and an illness that took him from us fast and wickedly furious. It was from the get-go, a wicked hard illness. So I lost him first to the illness. And then I lost him to the system that was not structured in a way that was going to rescue him from this really challenging illness. And then I lost him to suicide when he was 23 after that four-year struggle. So the title of my book, Gone Before Gone, exposes those layers of loss that I lost him and then I lost him and then I lost him. He was gone before he was gone. I talk to families all the time who are in that middle space where their loved ones with severe mental illness are still alive, but they are forever changed by their psychiatric conditions. Those families are in a space of grieving the loss of the loved one that they knew and the person that they believe would be in their family forever in a certain way, who is no longer that person. So they are grieving losses where someone is gone but not gone and might come back as the person they once were and they might not. So that liminal space of loss is where ambiguous loss happens. How did you take something that so many people think about? Of course, that's writing a book, and actually turn it into something real. What did it look like for you to go from the idea to sitting down and putting structure around it? In other words, pencil to paper. So what did that process look like?

From Seminars To A Book

3:01

When I started working for Treatment Advocacy Center almost three years ago, I started talking to families who were expressing grief that they could not explain. I remembered learning this term ambiguous loss while my own son was still living, and I wanted to give them more about what that might mean. What was your journey like putting this together? I started researching it and I came upon the work of Dr. Pauline Boss, who coined the term ambiguous loss and created some concepts for coping with it. I contacted her, and three years ago she was 89. Now she's 92, and I told her how I had lost my son three ways and how her term ambiguous loss had been useful to me, but I wanted to know more. And I specifically wanted to know if she had done any specific work with families of loved ones with severe mental illness. Her answer was not really. And I'm so glad you're interested in this topic. And I presume you're interested because you'd like to teach on the topic. So I hope you might take my course. Did you wind up taking the course? I did. I took her course from the University of Minnesota and became certified to teach about ambiguous loss. And I did that. I started teaching seminars through my job as something that we offer to families impacted by these losses. So have you been doing seminars now? And if you have, what has been the results of doing them? I have now done six seminars. These are eight-week online seminars. In the process of doing those seminars, I realized there was a lot more that I could offer these families who are trying to learn how to utilize these coping strategies. So I started to kind of think about how the work that I had built into a seminar might become the structure for a book. And I wasn't really sure how it was going to form until a year ago. On March 18th, 2025, which was the sixth anniversary of my son's death, I was very busy. In fact, I had an ambiguous loss seminar that day that I was scheduled to teach, and I did teach, but otherwise, I did my day. By the end of that day, I was becoming debilitated, and I wasn't even really sure why. Were these emotions overtaking you? I'm sure that you had time to reflect. After you did, what did you determine? It struck me all at once that although I was teaching people to see their grief and give it some time and some space, I had literally not done that on the anniversary of my son's death. So I canceled the rest of my week and thought that I was probably gonna spend the rest of the week in bed weeping, but I couldn't sleep. Instead, I came into my office and I sat down at my laptop at something like four or five o'clock in the morning on one of those days, and I just started typing. And the first words that I typed were on the night I first lost Calvin, and I started typing about what it was like to lose the son that was sitting in front of me behind his own eyes as he was lost in his psychosis. And I started to realize that my own story was a story of ambiguous loss that could guide people toward their own self-healing. And that became the structure for telling my story at the same time I provided guidance for other families managing this grief beyond belief. How do you

Defining Ambiguous Loss And Guilt

6:51

define ambiguous loss in a way people can truly understand? And once someone recognizes they're living through it, how do they begin to heal from something that doesn't really have a clear ending? Indeed, this is a challenging process. And I in no way will share my book as a quick fix or, you know, a 10-minute pathway to healing. You know, it is not that kind of book. This is a deep journey into yourself. And I'm very clear with my readers that I'm here for you, but this will challenge you. An ambiguous loss is a loss that lacks clarity and resolution. The ambiguity is in the circumstances of loss and is therefore external to the person who is feeling the grief. And it's the ambiguity that cannot be fixed. So, for example, if your loved one is lost in psychosis, it is as though they are gone, but not all the way gone, and you're not really clear on when or whether they might come back to you as the person that you know. Right, right. So the ambiguity is in the circumstances of the person you love and their illness. It is not my grief that is ambiguous, it is the circumstances of loss that are ambiguous, and it's the ambiguity that I cannot fix. Okay. So that's the part of the definition that means it lacks clarity. Before we even get into defining it, I want to start where the listener is. There are people listening right now who feel like they've lost something or someone, but they can't fully explain it. It's not a clear goodbye, it's not something people around them always recognize, but it still hurts. For those people, what are they exactly feeling? And for someone either going through it now or just beginning to realize it, what should they expect from a loss that doesn't really feel like a loss, but yet it is. Yeah, I want to add a word to the mix, and that word is guilt. Okay. And part of the reason that I got really invested in this work is I was on a lot of social media networks where family members of loved ones, especially with schizophrenia, would say something like this I feel like my son has died while I'm still trying to save his life. Right. And I feel really guilty about grieving while he's the one who is suffering so much. Right? Right. Okay. That makes sense. So part of the coping is go ahead and acknowledge this is a grief experience. The very first coping guidance is name the losses. What have I lost? I've lost the relationship that I had with my son before he got sick. I lost the future that I imagined for him. I lost a sense of safety and predictability. These are intangibles. It's not the same as I lost my dad because he died from cancer, and there's a death certificate, right? That gives some resolution to that, to that loss. So you're grieving for a person like they have died, but yet they're still alive. Yeah. That is a very tough scenario to handle. Yeah. They're physically present, but mentally, emotionally, they've gone somewhere so dark that it feels like you've already lost them. So how do you begin to cope with that? And how do you bridge that gap when there's no clear line between holding on and letting go? The first step really is to acknowledge the ambiguity and accept the ambiguity. And accepting the ambiguity doesn't necessarily mean that you accept the circumstances as, well, it is what it is, right? Because that feels really cruel when something really rough is happening. So you accept the ambiguity and you recognize I have lost things I never expected to lose. I have lost that predictability, I've lost that safety, I've lost the closeness of the relationship that I had with my loved one before they changed a lot, right? So you accept those losses and then you start to seek meaning from those losses. So for me, in my uh seminars, I share a photo of a place that I hike frequently on the Oregon coast. And there's a fence row up on a sand dune, basically, that I followed for years. Loved the vistas. All at once, in a single weekend, a humongous sinkhole developed on this path that I had walked hundreds of times. The ground collapsed. Okay. The meaning I made from that picture related to my son's illness is that's what it felt like. It felt like everything that I believed to be solid ground had gone out from under me. And there no longer was anything solid in my life, nothing I could count on anymore in the structure of my life. So acknowledging that doesn't fix the situation, but it gives me permission to grieve. Who wouldn't grieve if the grounding of their life went out from under them? Of course, I'm experiencing loss and grief, right? When we

Coping Tools For Unresolvable Grief

13:01

think about traditional grief, people often talk about the five steps: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then eventually some level of acceptance. In a situation like this, when they're grieving for someone that is still here, this kind of loss isn't clean. There's no finality to it. So when someone is going through this, are they experiencing those same stages, or is this a completely different kind of emotional process? In ambiguous loss coping, the work is entirely nonlinear. So there are six coping guidelines that I learned from Dr. Pauline Boss and that I share with my seminar groups and that I share through my book. I make it clear, as Dr. Boss made it clear, that these are not linear. It is not step one, check. Got that done. Now I'm moving on to step two. It doesn't work like that. It is more like a Mobius strip, okay, where all of the coping guidelines sort of interface with one another as you journey on in this learning to cope place. And coping does not bring resolution. And this can be disappointing, and it has been disappointing to some of my seminar participants. I had one woman in session number eight say to me, I thought you were gonna cure my grief. And now I realize I'm just at the beginning of learning to live with my grief. Yeah, yeah. So it is never about getting over the grief, it is about learning to accept grief as a lifelong companion. Right. And how do you walk alongside a grief that is unresolvable and still experience all of the other aspects of life, including joy, including excitement, including, you know, whatever else comes along in your life, so that the grief part of your life doesn't consume you and become the only identity that you have? I say this to a lot of people. Healing doesn't mean the event never happened, it just means it no longer defines you moving forward. But in a situation like this, where the loss isn't clear and it may not ever fully resolve, how does someone actually get to that point? How do you begin to heal while also accepting that this may have changed your life, but it doesn't have to define the life that you still get to live? I address that directly in the book. And the question that I ask at the opening of the book, I ask again at the end of the book. And that question is this what is it that you are not doing because grief has gotten in your way? Right. Okay, yeah, I like that. So you know when you've started to heal, when you start to put agency toward that. Whatever that thing is that you know in the depth of your being is a thing that you ought to be doing with your life. Right. And you're no longer frozen in a place where you cannot proceed with your own life goals and plans. This isn't a loss with an ending. It's something that's still unfolding every single day. For that person on the outside of it, there can be a lot of guilt in even thinking about moving forward. They also could have that feeling of if I start living again, am I leaving them behind and abandoning them? So, how does someone navigate that space where they still can care deeply, but also begin to live their own life again? The beginning of that is, and I tell my participants to write this on a sticky note and put it on their bathroom mirror. This is not my fault, right? Right. Yeah. This is not my fault. This illness is not my fault, these circumstances are not my fault. This is not my fault. So separating yourself from blame is a beginning. And then as we move through the coping guidelines, the one that I think people in Western culture struggle the most with is called adjust mastery. Okay. And adjust mastery means to recognize when you're trying to control something that is not within your scope of control. Right. And to let go of trying to control those things because we spin ourselves out of energy, trying to control things that aren't within our scope of control. Yeah. So now adjust mastery doesn't mean let go or stop trying. It means get real with what is possible within your scope of control. And so it means if your loved one, let's say your loved one is psychotic and homeless. Okay. Are there actions you can take to try to motivate either your loved one to shift something or to motivate the system to support your loved one in a different way? After you've examined the options available to you, you have to let go. And then there's another adjacent coping guideline, which is to revise attachment, right? Right. So you cannot be attached to, well, if I do this perfectly right, everything will go the way I want it to go. Right. If you cling to that, you also will spin yourself out of energy. So you do what you can with what you know when you know it. And then you have to revise your attachments, you have to adjust your mastery and recognize that the outcome is ultimately not yours to control. And so once you have relieved yourself of that burden, which is all based in guilt, yeah. If you believe that it is yours to fix this unfixable situation, you will be riddled with guilt if the outcome is not what you want, right? So once you relieve yourself of that burden of guilt and over-responsibility, you create more space in your life for some other things.

Finding The Book And Spreading It

19:31

Have you released the book yet? Yes. The book was published at the end of February. February. Okay. Now, how do people find it so they can buy it? So it is available on Amazon. So if you're an Amazon user, it's easy to look up by title and andor my author name. My publisher is called The Sager Group, which is the S-A-G-E-R group. Okay. And it's the Sager Group.net. And if you go to that website, there's a bookshelf and you click on the blue and purple book with the owl on the cover that says gone before gone, and that will open all of the options for purchasing the book as an e-book, a paperback, or a hardback. And there's an audiobook to come. I'm going to be doing an audiobook, I hope, by the end of the year. Is it in any of the bookstores yet? Or is it still just online? It's a good question. There is effort underway to have it placed in some bookstores, and that's something that readers can do in their local communities to try to get the book placed in bookstores and in local libraries. But it's a very local process to get a book placed. So if you want the book right now, look online. If you want it to be more broadly available in your community, encouraging bookstores and libraries to stock it, you know, would be wonderful, wonderfully helpful. We've

Do Now Prompts For Self Work

20:58

talked about a lot of the weight behind this. Now I want to shift into the experience of the reader. When someone picks up your book, they're coming in with their own understanding, maybe even confusion about what they're going through. What do you hope that they feel or recognize at the beginning? How does that evolve as they go deeper into it? And by the time they finish, what kind of shift do you hope that they've experienced? I think some people who pick up my book will expect it to be a memoir. And there are elements of memoir in it because I do share some intimate storytelling from my own lived experience as another. Sure. And I think readers are becoming pleasantly surprised that my journey is actually a way to reflect their journey back to them. Right. It is a self help book. And every few pages, there is a pause place that carefully delineated in the way that the book is structured. And it's called do now. And these are questions to contemplate. There's some breathing exercises. There's suggestions if you want to do a written journal or an audio journal or if you want to do art. There are suggestions for how you might work your way through the topics so that you're on a journey of self-discovery. At the same time, you're learning how I went through that journey of self-discovery. So it the book becomes a reflection back on the reader. And I am being told by my readers feels like an intimate conversation. Nice, nice. When someone finishes your book without giving anything away, do you see it as a moment where they can sit back, not only reflect on your lived experience, but also their own? And do you think it helps them find any sense of clarity or closure, or is it more about helping them understand what they're carrying so they can begin to move forward? Closure

Closure Is A Myth Build Community

23:06

is a myth. And Dr. Pauline Boss, who founded Ambiguous Loss Theory, wrote a book called The Myth of Closure. Okay. So closure, I'm sorry, is not going to be something you're going to find through this process of coping with ambiguous loss. How to move onward. I hope so. How to address the question of what is it that I haven't been doing because grief has gotten in the way? I hope so. Right. And then the other thing I really hope people feel inspired toward as they move through the book is how to cultivate a more empathetic community. Yes, that would be really nice because it is needed. And at the yeah, at the end of the book, I have a section called study group guidance, which is some really specific guidelines for how to use this book to create a support network in your own community. So there's some prompts and there's some guidance about how to use this book to create a group of folks who will continue in this journey of coping with ambiguous loss together. Right, right. I hope that my book will help some people come out of the shadows because there is so much fear, there's stigma, there's discrimination, there's isolation that comes from all of that. And so I know from my ambiguous loss seminar participants that some families in these really challenging circumstances get more and more isolated. And you do not fully heal in isolation. Right. We heal as human beings in community. And so we can start with self-work. We can start with these sort of inner contemplations, and then to take it to the next place, we need to heal in community. And so I actually provide guidance about how to talk about ambiguous law. Okay. One of the things that's come out of my seminars is a lot of families isolate because they don't want to be asked, How are the kids? Okay. When nothing is okay. And so there's brainstorming in the book about how you might respond to that without burning out your own energy. So how we talk to our friends, how we communicate within our families, and how we cultivate an empathetic community is all addressed in this book.

Final Reflections And Farewell

25:45

Well, this has been a powerful conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to share this information. I know there's a lot of families in need out there. So I hope my book is helpful. Well, it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. A sincere thank you to our guests for sharing their journey. If today's conversation helped you see the world a little differently, then we're doing exactly what we hope to do. Until next time, keep believing, keep learning, and most importantly, keep asking yourself why not me?